


find a way to forgive myself

by napricot



Series: you had your soul with you [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) - Alternate 2012 Timeline, M/M, Undercover Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24417814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napricot/pseuds/napricot
Summary: “Okay, let’s try this again,” says Steve’s own voice. “I’m not Loki and I really need you to listen to me. The literal fate of your universe depends on it.” Steve comes up swinging before he’s even really opened his eyes. “Oh for god’s—”As if Steve’s life isn’t already weird enough what with the waking up in the 21st century and fighting aliens thing, his future self’s Time Heist and Reverse Time Heist have left 2012 Steve in a pretty awkward position: not only does he have to pretend to be HYDRA in order to save Bucky, but now he also has to help save the whole damn universe too? Luckily for him, if the first time was tragedy, then the second time around is definitely a hell of a lot closer to farce.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: you had your soul with you [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1760425
Comments: 258
Kudos: 765





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The National's "You Had Your Soul with You".
> 
> Over a year later, here is the 2012 timeline Steve set into motion during his Reverse Time Heist in [like heaven stood up in you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18691345)! You don't really need to read that fic to understand this one though.
> 
> This fic is mostly finished, and should be fully posted within the next week or so as I finish up with edits and the last couple scenes.

What with the alien invasion and gods running around and the near death by atom bomb, Steve’s had a very long, very strange day. The strangest day of his life, in fact, which is really saying something given that he’s already had days that have included: 1) Nazis who rip their own faces off, 2) Steve gaining superpowers, and 3) waking back up after spending seventy years frozen in the Arctic Sea.

And yet it’s not the alien spaceships pouring through a hole in the sky that puts this particular day on the top of the list of strange days. Nor is it the alien gods, or the seemingly mild-mannered scientist who turns into an enormous green rage monster, or the billionaire in a suit of flying, robotic armor. It’s not even fighting against a version of himself.

It’s this moment and all the moments that follow it: the moment when Steve wakes up and hears his own voice, and it’s not him talking.

“Okay, let’s try this again,” says Steve’s own voice. “I’m not Loki and I really need you to listen to me. The literal fate of your universe depends on it.” Steve comes up swinging before he’s even really opened his eyes. “Oh for god’s—”

His punch is blocked and caught, and with his eyes open, he sees that it’s Loki impersonating him again, except—he looks different. This version of Loki-as-Steve has longer hair and a beard, and is wearing some kind of white and gray uniform. He doesn’t look much like Steve himself does at all.

It’s enough to make Steve hesitate and back off for a moment. Why would Loki bother with so radically changing the appearance of someone he’s impersonating? And where the hell is Loki’s scepter? Now that he’s looking around, he no longer seems to be in Stark Tower. He no longer seems to be anywhere, actually, the landscape around him gone vague and blurry.

“Where have you taken me? Where’s the scepter? What the hell are you up to, Loki?”

Loki-as-Steve sighs. “Am I really this stubborn?” he mutters, as if to himself, then he shakes his head and focuses on Steve. It’s strange to see such a serious, pleading expression on his own face. If this is really Loki, he’s a hell of an actor. “I told you, I’m not Loki. And we’re still in Stark Tower, I’m just in your head. You’re still out cold.”

“Because you knocked me out and stole the scepter!”

The other Steve-or-Loki winces. “Yeah, sorry about that. We really needed it, and I brought it back.” Steve’s mirrored face goes stern, and wow, okay, the official Captain America look is kind of annoying now that Steve himself is on the other side of it. “Listen, we don’t have much time. There’s a lot I’ve got to tell you, and, I can’t stress this enough, your entire universe depends on this.” He pauses, seeming to consider, and adds, “Bucky’s _life_ depends on it. So please, just listen first, punch second for once, alright?”

_Bucky is alive_. The imposter had said it before, but surely he’d done it just to distract Steve. It’s almost certainly some cruel trick, it has to be, but—what if it isn’t?

“If you’re not Loki, then who the hell are you?” asks Steve.

“I’m _you_. I’m Steve Rogers. Only I’m from the year 2024, and if what I’m doing right now works, if you believe me, you can avoid becoming me.”

“Prove it,” Steve demands.

He’s heard a hell of a lot of crazy things since waking up in the 21st century, but this has got to be the craziest. Are hallucinations a sign of head trauma? Mostly all the head trauma Steve has gotten since getting the serum has led to him being out cold for a few hours, but there’s a first time for everything, he supposes.

“Prove I’m from 2024?” asks the maybe-hallucination.

“No, prove you’re me, prove to me that Bucky’s alive. Prove you’re real.”

Loki-as-Steve tilts his head and grimaces in a dizzyingly familiar gesture of frustration, before his face settles into earnest resolve.

“I can prove that I’m real when you wake up again. As for the rest…” The imposter or hallucination frowns, seems to think hard for a moment. “When we were eleven, we’re the one who broke Mrs. O’Leary’s kitchen window with a baseball. We let Billy Mackey take the blame, and we’ve felt guilty about it ever since, never even told Bucky about it.”

Of all the secrets Steve has kept over the years, this is one of the smallest and most harmless, inconsequential by most standards. And yet, it _is_ still a secret, one he’d never told anyone else about.

“I really should’ve saved up and paid for the damages for Mrs. O’Leary,” Steve murmurs, struck with guilt all over again.

The imposter/hallucination smiles a little, and now his eyes grow soft, almost starry, his voice going low and tender.

“Yeah, we should’ve, but we spent our money on Bucky’s birthday present instead. Got him a bag of penny candy and some awful pulp novel he’d wanted, and he shared the candy and read the book to us, remember? And we drew him pictures of it. He put ‘em up by his bed, kept ‘em up for ages.”

The memory comes back with too-intense vividness, and somehow, the sheer sweetness of it, its almost impossible innocence, hurts worse than the grief. If this is Loki, how could he know about it? Steve’s life is the stuff of history books now, but the history books and movies and Wikipedia articles don’t have this, they don’t have the dozens, hundreds, _thousands_ , of memories of Steve and Bucky being Steveandbucky. No, the whole of that is distilled down into a few sentences, if that— _inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield_ —as if so little could ever hope to contain so much.

So how would Loki know? He can’t read minds, not based on anything else he’s done today. But this being a future version of Steve, Bucky being alive—it can’t be true. Because that’s well beyond just having a strange day, that’s insanity. Steve’s finally snapped, he’s gone crazy just like SHIELD had worried he would, after coming out of the ice. He shakes his head, starts to push his doppelgänger away, but he moves too fast for Steve, holds him in a tight grapple that’s almost a hug.

“Bucky’s alive, I swear it,” he says, low and urgent into Steve’s ear. “He’s alive right now where I come from, in 2024, and he’s alive here, in 2012. He—he’ll be alive, and he’ll read to you again—he’s got better taste in books now.”

The doppelgänger turns Steve’s head with a firm grip, and there he is, there’s Bucky. He looks very different from the Bucky Steve had last seen: this Bucky has long hair, long enough that it’s almost brushing his shoulders, and he’s bearded too; he’s somehow managed to grow even more handsome, the last bits of youthful baby fat having melted away to highlight his cheekbones and the sharp line of his jaw. There are new lines around his eyes, deep creases of joy: more evidence of time’s passage, and Steve wants to map those lines with his fingertips, as if he could learn the years that had carved them by touch alone. There’s a book in Bucky’s lap, and he’s looking up from it with sparkling eyes, a smile on his lips, his tanned skin washed with the deep amber light of a perfect late afternoon. He’s missing his left arm. He is, quite possibly, the most beautiful thing Steve has ever seen.

Steve’s knees buckle, and the sound that comes out of him is a terrible thing, some keening mix of grief and pure longing, and the doppelgänger holds him tightly as they both sink to their knees.

Steve could never imagine Bucky like this, wouldn’t know how to—there’s so much he doesn’t understand, and god, Bucky’s arm, what happened to—

“It’s okay,” murmurs the imposter—the other Steve. “It’s okay, I swear, he’ll be okay. He’ll—he’ll be safe, and happy, and he’ll still read to you, when you ask him to, and he’ll still put up the sketches you draw for him, and the paintings too. He’s—he’s been through hell and back, god, the things they did to him, HYDRA had to _erase_ him to make him theirs, and he still fought them—but he’s so fucking strong. He’ll work so fucking hard to get better, to come back to you. He will always, _always_ come back to you. So please, _please_ , listen to me so that you can save him, and the whole rest of the universe too.”

There’s so much desperate love in this rough echo of Steve’s own voice. No imposter could ever fake it, and maybe Loki could know that Bucky is Steve’s weak spot, but surely he could never know Steve loves Bucky this much. Not even Bucky had known, after all. It’s the biggest secret Steve has ever kept, one he’d even kept from himself in a lot of ways. Because Steve hadn’t known either, not entirely, not until he’d lost Bucky.

“Tell me,” Steve says, eyes still fixed on the image of Bucky. “Tell me everything.”

“Thank you,” says his future self with a sigh of relief. “Alright. God, I hope this works.”

And that’s when Steve’s brain explodes, kind of.

* * *

When Steve regains consciousness, his head feels like it’s about to burst. There’s the throbbing ache of having taken a recent blow to the head, and on top of that, there’s—

“Cap? Cap, come in, what’s your status—”

It’s Rumlow. A nauseating cascade of information floods his head: memories that aren’t his but are, all blaring in warning at him.

His future self—or his hallucination?—is still here, only now he’s here in what must be the real world, given how much Steve’s head is hurting. The other Steve doesn’t have a beard anymore, and Steve could almost think he’s looking up into a mirror, but no—his future self has unhappy lines carved harshly around his mouth, a deep furrow in his forehead, proof of the years and sorrows separating the two of them, and Steve’s pretty sure it’s not the kind of detail Loki would ever think of.

His future self hands the scepter over to him, and Steve’s fingers close around it automatically as he tries to answer Rumlow’s increasingly sharp demands for a sitrep.

“Copy, I’m—”

He swallows past the metallic-tasting saliva rising in his mouth. Everything just needs to stop for a while, a long while, so he can sort through the mess his older self has just dumped in his head. Or so he can throw up, one or the other. Maybe both.

His future self offers him a hand up, then he plucks Steve’s communicator out of his ear, and takes over. “I’m fine. Loki showed up, tried to take the scepter, but he didn’t succeed.”

When his future self lets him go, Steve staggers and sways, swallowing a groan as the room swims around him. Future-Steve grimaces apologetically, mouths a _sorry_. 

“Is the scepter secure?” Steve can hear Rumlow demand, his voice faint and tinny with distance. “Where’s Loki?”

His future self returns Steve’s communicator to him.

“You can do this,” murmurs his future self, then he touches something on his wrist and disappears.

So much for a pep talk. Or really anything in the way of useful and/or actionable advice.

“Cap? Cap, come in!”

“The scepter is secure,” says Steve, as firmly as he can. “Loki’s gone, must’ve given it up as a loss and made a run for it,” he says.

How the hell Steve’s going to keep the scepter secure though, he has no idea. Plan, plan, he needs a plan, what had his older self told Rumlow and Sitwell—

“We’re almost to you, Cap, hang tight.”

The memory reaches him just as Rumlow and Sitwell do: _hail HYDRA_ , future Steve had told them, and his stomach lurches again. _Orders from Pierce_. A whole new, even more sickening rush of knowledge floods into his mind, and it’s like the mental equivalent of being in the Vita-Ray machine, the same sensation of expanding almost beyond his ability to bear it. He doesn’t know if it’s the head trauma or the sheer volume of information his future self has transferred to him, but his head is pounding so hard that it feels like his brain’s about to dribble out of his ears, the pain and sheer overwhelming rush of it all enough to make him drop to his knees again.

“Cap, you okay?” asks Sitwell as Rumlow heaves Steve to his feet.

“Took a hit to the head, Loki packs a hell of a punch,” Steve says, and tries to keep hold of the scepter—he needs to get it to Fury, or Stark, figure out what to do from there—but Sitwell grabs it.

“We’re falling back to the original plan,” says Sitwell. “If Loki wants this thing, we need to get it locked down ASAP. Rumlow, get Cap some medical attention, I’ll get the scepter to Dr. List.” Sitwell pauses, then nods awkwardly at Steve. “Uh, hail HYDRA, sir.”

Oh, _fuck_ his future self.

For a few seconds, Steve entertains the possibility of taking out Sitwell and Rumlow, grabbing the scepter and running—but that plan would only get him two steps ahead of his current clusterfuck when he needs to be miles away from it, when he needs enough breathing room to sort through the mess in his head. Also, that plan would require Steve _not_ vomiting all over Rumlow, which is about all Steve is capable of at the moment in the way of distraction or evasion. It’s pretty gross.

The appalled look on Rumlow’s face is, at least, kind of satisfying.

“Sorry,” says Steve, without much sincerity. “I think I have a concussion.”

His last thought before he passes out again is _thanks a lot, future me._

* * *

This time, when Steve regains consciousness, he’s in a bed, the sound of a bustling infirmary all around him. His head still aches, an almost feverish kind of dull pounding, and when he remembers why it aches, the pounding gets worse.

_Bucky is alive and SHIELD is full of HYDRA and Rumlow thinks I’m HYDRA and in seven years half of the universe is going to be killed by a giant purple genocidal alien and Stark is going to die and so is Romanoff and—_

“Rogers? You awake?” says a too-familiar husky voice softly.

“Where am I?” he asks.

“You’re in the SHIELD infirmary, in Manhattan.” There’s a pause, then the voice says carefully, “It’s 2012.”

He squints his eyes open to see Romanoff, and for a moment, he sees her in dizzying double vision: the Romanoff sitting at his bedside, her hair short and red, a few healing scrapes on her pale and lovely face, and Natasha, her hair in a long braid that fades from red to blond at the tip, her face weary but hopeful. There’s some other version of him who loves her, or who will love her, some other, future version of him who knows what it is to grieve her, but the feelings are echoing and distant, his and not his at the same time. And yet, these new memories are clear: Steve can trust her, Steve _should_ trust her.

He’s been quiet too long, because Natasha’s brow furrows. “Really hoping the year isn’t a surprise to you. You remember me, right? Let me get the doctor—”

“Natasha,” he croaks. “Agent Romanoff, I mean. I remember you.” He remembers her too much, even. “And I know it’s 2012.”

“Good,” she says with a relieved smile. “How’re you feeling? You remember what happened before you passed out?”

If he tells her he fought with his future self and then got dire warnings about the future from him, Steve’s guessing he won’t be getting out of this infirmary bed any time soon.

“Someone tried to take the scepter…” he says slowly. “We fought…”

“That’s right. You remember who it was?”

Steve closes his eyes, tries to buy himself some time. He can’t tell the truth—he’s not even sure the truth is _real_ , this could all still be the result of head trauma—but if he says it was Loki…

“Was it Loki?” He rubs his head and eyes. “It’s all kinda fuzzy, if I’m being honest. I remember taking custody of the scepter, and then—nothing.”

Natasha smiles, and Steve knows it’s not her real smile. This is Agent Romanoff being professional and friendly, non-threatening.

“Well, Loki got away,” she says. “But you did hold onto the scepter, so good work.”

“Thanks,” says Steve, and closes his throbbing eyes for a moment. The darkness behind his eyes is too full, and Steve has the nauseating sensation that all the memories from his other self are seething behind that darkness, ready to overtake him.

“I’m gonna go get a nurse or a doctor, have them take a look at you,” says Natasha as she stands.

“I’m fine. I’ve got a thick skull, thanks to the serum.”

“Sure, but maybe let the doctors who can look at your brain make sure you haven’t done any damage.”

Steve nearly objects on pure reflex, before he realizes that yeah, he really should make sure he doesn’t have some kind of terrible brain injury that would explain his possible hallucination. Though he’s not sure what would be worse: that he does, or that he doesn’t. Both options seem about equally impossible to deal with right now. But if he’s not crazy, if the visit from his future self was real…then Bucky’s alive and Steve’s willing to throw himself into whatever wars he needs to if it’ll mean getting Bucky back.

* * *

The doctors confirm that his brain isn’t particularly damaged beyond an already healing concussion, but they order a minimum of three days of cognitive rest and seem decidedly unhappy when Steve asks to check himself out against their advice. Natasha watches it all with amused interest; she’s almost certainly here to keep an eye on him on Fury’s orders, but apparently she considers that a hands-off role, because she doesn’t try to convince him to stay in the infirmary. Steve finally manages to secure his escape from the infirmary by promising to stay off-duty for at least two days, and to check in every day for a quick cognitive assessment “just in case.”

“Headed back to your place?” asks Natasha once he’s walking swiftly away from the infirmary. “You could crash in the quarters here, you know. Getting out of Manhattan’s gonna be a nightmare, what with all the damage and clean up from the battle.”

She’s not wrong. By all rights, he should stay here, if not out of the prudence the doctors wish he’d have more of, then at least out of convenience. But SHIELD’s been infiltrated by HYDRA, and because Steve’s day has not been strange and terrible enough already, there’s Rumlow, headed right for them.

He’s not going to _hail HYDRA_ Steve, is he? Surely not, they’re in the middle of the damn hallway, and Natasha’s right here. But if he stays here at HQ, then Rumlow and Sitwell will know where to find him, and they might come to ask questions that Steve can’t even begin to answer. Questions like, _you’re HYDRA? Since when? And why did you spend the whole war going after Schmidt and killing our fellow members of HYDRA?_

“Shit,” he mutters, and Natasha turns to him with a raised eyebrow.

“Language, Captain,” she says, her tone delighted, but Steve’s too busy looking for an escape route to indulge in any banter.

_Darling, you make an excellent leader of a commando squad, but covert operations are not your forte_ , Peggy had told him once, and she hadn’t been wrong. Steve can manage, with enough preparation and a cover story in place. He does not have anywhere near enough preparation right now. He _needs_ to avoid Rumlow.

Fuck it. “I need to avoid Rumlow,” he hisses to Natasha.

“Is this about how you threw up all over him? Because it was gross and all, but Rumlow’s not exactly mad at you about it. He’s an asshole, yeah, just not that kind of asshole, he knows you didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I kind of did do it on purpose though,” Steve tells her, and has the pleasure of seeing her truly surprised, all the usual careful control on her face disappearing in favor of raised eyebrows and an open mouth. “So can you please help me?”

Natasha goes into action quickly, and nudges him so he falls into step behind a couple of tall SHIELD agents, then directs him to a sparsely populated hallway on the left. Steve heads for the elevator that’s situated near the hallway’s end at a walk almost fast enough to be a jog, Natasha keeping pace beside him.

“This’ll take you up to the Times Square entrance of HQ,” she says once they reach it, pushing the button to call the elevator. She tips her head and studies him while they wait for it to arrive. “So, I have a lot of questions. But the most important one is: are you alright?”

He’s really not, and he really can’t explain why. He just needs to get as far as he can from SHIELD without arousing any more suspicion than he already has; he suspects that isn’t going to be very far at all. But he desperately needs some goddamn space to make a start on figuring all this out, and he’ll take whatever he can get.

“I’ll be fine,” he tells Natasha, and while she narrows her eyes at him, she also hums in something like acceptance.

“If you say so. Why’d you throw up on Rumlow?”

“Like you said, he’s an asshole. Thanks for helping me, Agent Romanoff.”

The elevator arrives, finally, and Steve steps inside.

“You’re really not what I expected, Cap,” Romanoff murmurs, her green eyes sparkling with a mix of sharp interest and delight. Just as he pushes the button, she adds, “Call me Natasha.”

“Steve,” he tells her. “It’s—Cap’s for the propaganda reels. I’m just Steve.”

“Alright. See you in a few days then, just Steve. And don’t think you can sneak back into Midtown to help with the cleanup, you’re officially off-duty for at least a day or two.”

“Understood,” he says, and some sense of perverse, giddy mischief makes him give her his best Captain America smile along with a crisp salute as the doors close. He hears her laugh as the elevator rises.

She probably thinks he’s nuts now. That’s alright. Hell, Steve feels pretty crazy, after all, and the world feels pretty crazy too. He might as well act it.

* * *

After a stop at his apartment, Steve does end up sneaking back into Midtown, and he does take a couple detours to help clean up the dead aliens and the remains of their vehicles, but, really, he’s only there to get to Stark Tower, where Stark is throwing his company’s resources into dealing with the fallout of the battle and coordinating clean up efforts.

He finds Stark in the makeshift command center that’s been set up in Stark Tower’s lobby, which is full of equipment and first responders and SHIELD agents milling around in an organized kind of chaos. No one pays Steve any mind once he flashes his SHIELD ID—without the Cap uniform, he’s just another SHIELD agent, one of many among the throng—but Stark catches sight of him and gestures him over.

The mere sight of Stark is enough to set his stomach roiling with guilt and secondhand grief. Steve now knows for a fact that when it comes down to it, Stark’s more than ready to put himself on the line for others. Steve gets the impression his future self hadn’t had—wouldn’t? won’t? time travel tenses are impossible—the best relationship with Stark, and Steve’s not sure he’ll be able to manage much better now, not if it’s true that Bucky—the Winter Soldier, on HYDRA’s brutally enforced orders—had killed Howard and Maria Stark. That, Steve suspects, might just strangle any possible friendship between him and Stark in the cradle.

Steve has to try though. If there’s even the smallest chance that any of what his future self had shown him is real, if he can avoid making the same mistakes…he has to try.

“A little bird told me you’re supposed to be off-duty,” says Stark in a singsong tone. “I know you’ve got the serum and all, but even superheroes gotta follow post-concussion protocol. You’re benched for a day or two, Cap.”

“I’m not here as Cap,” says Steve. “I’m, uh, here to take you up on your offer of a room here at the Tower, actually.”

Stark’s visibly surprised, his eyebrows rocketing up to his hairline, before he recovers with a sharp grin.

“Thought you said my building is hideous?”

“I got strong opinions on architecture and how this building’s an eyesore, sure, but if I’m living in it, I don’t have to look at it, now do I? And I think it’s more important for the team to stick together right about now.”

As the words come out of his mouth, Steve suppresses a wince—he’d been shooting for some teasing banter, the kind of shooting the shit and affectionate insults the Howlies had excelled at—but Stark might not take it that way, and Steve’s tone isn’t quite light enough, still sharp with stress and the pulse of pain in his head.

Stark, thankfully, doesn’t take his tone or his words amiss and just grins. “Oh we’re a team now, are we?”

“I’d like to be,” says Steve. “And…I owe you an apology for misjudging you, and for some of the things I said before the battle. It was uncalled for and unprofessional of me. You did good work in the field, Stark.”

This surprises Stark even more, enough that his mouth drops open in shock. A pleased kind of flush takes up residence on his face too, and he actually looks down, seemingly rendered shy by the praise.

“Thanks. I’m, uh, sorry too. For that, you know, everything special about you came out of a bottle comment. And you can stay in the Tower, obviously.” Stark follows his awkward sincerity up with a showman’s kind of smile. “I could even have a whole floor designed for you, Capsicle! Clearly, I’ve got some renovations to do, so might as well tack some more on,” he says, gesturing vaguely up towards the wreckage of the penthouse suite.

“Just a room will do,” says Steve.

He only needs somewhere that he can be reasonably certain isn’t bugged, and while the memories provided by his future self are silent on the matter of his current apartment’s safety, Steve’s not willing to risk returning to it just yet. He’d only gone back to fill a duffel bag with some clothes, toiletries, and his sketchbooks, then he’d come right back to Midtown and Stark Tower.

SHIELD had set him up with that apartment, and SHIELD, apparently, is rotten with HYDRA. Steve needs to regroup, and he needs to do it somewhere out of SHIELD’s reach.

“I can do a little better than a room,” says Stark, and shows him to a spacious apartment furnished with bland tastefulness. “We always keep some apartments free to host SI employees or guests, so mi company’s casa es su casa. I’ll have JARVIS issue you security credentials, one of the bots’ll drop them off in a bit. There should be enough in the fridge and cupboards to tide you over for now, and JARVIS will put in a food order for you once the emergency cordon’s lifted.”

“Thanks, Stark. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem.” Stark hesitates before he leaves. “You sure you’re alright, Cap? Your head okay? Romanoff says you took a pretty nasty hit.”

“I’m fine, I’ve got a hard skull and I got the all-clear from SHIELD medical.”

“Yeah, alright. I’ll make you a new helmet anyway. A whole new uniform, even. That spandex get up SHIELD had you in was a travesty, where’d they even get it from, the Smithsonian’s archives? You need something that’ll actually offer some protection. Kevlar, maybe, at least for the chest and torso…”

Stark wanders off towards the elevator, still muttering to himself, probably headed for his lab. An echo of some other version of Steve’s fondness and grief blows through him as he watches Stark go, and Steve has to consciously shove down another surge of memories. _Not now_ , _not yet_.

Before Stark gets in the elevator, Steve says, “Hey, Tony?” Stark turns, nothing distracted about him now, his eyes sharp on Steve. “You still have that backdoor into SHIELD’s files?”

“JARVIS grabbed a bunch of data, and I made sure to leave me and JARVIS a backdoor, yeah. Figured I’d poke around at some point, see what ol’ Nick’s been up to with the Tesseract. Why? You really distrust Fury that much?”

Steve shakes his head and says, “It’s not Fury I distrust. It’s SHIELD. Just—hang onto those files and that backdoor. Don’t mention it to anyone other than the Avengers.”

“Alright,” says Tony slowly. “You wanna tell me what this is about, Cap?”

“Steve. Call me Steve, please. And—I will. I swear. But—take a look at those files, first. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

Maybe he’s totally lost his mind. But if he hasn’t, if this new knowledge of the future that he has is all true, then Tony _will_ find something. And then he’ll believe Steve.

“Yeah, okay. The Tesseract weapon stuff _was_ pretty sketchy. I’ll look into it.”

“Thanks, Tony.”

Tony leaves then, frowning hard enough to make deep furrows appear on his forehead. Steve can only hope that Tony hasn’t just written him off as concussed or crazy.

* * *

Inside the apartment, Steve pulls his sketchbook and pencils out of his duffel bag, sits on the living room’s too-firm couch, and starts to sort through the mess of memory his future self had left him with. Steve had a good memory before the serum, and after it, his memory became eidetic, almost too sharp, the edge of his own remembered emotions always keen and ready to cut, the sense memories of sight and smell and sound vivid with detail. His future self had clearly made an effort to only give him what would be tactically relevant, but with the way Steve’s memory works, even that’s almost too much. There are just too many damn memories with too little context, and so much pain too, messy emotions staining everything. Even this fraction of his future self’s memories of the last twelve years—the next twelve years to come—is almost too much for Steve to bear, and his head starts to pound again.

He grits his teeth and dives into the memories anyway.

He jots down names and places and dates as they come to him, doesn’t make any attempt to order it all yet. He just scrawls down whatever comes to him, fills page after page with names and places and dates: Alexander Pierce, the location of a vault in a suburb of Washington DC, Carol Danvers, Sam Wilson, the Lemurian Star, Sokovia, Helmut Zemo, the Winter Soldier, Karpov, Wakanda, Ultron, Infinity Stones, Scott Lang…

When he has it all down, or at least, when he thinks he does, he looks through it all again and again, and all he can do is laugh. He laughs and laughs, until he cries, because _what the hell._ Aliens and gods and HYDRA and Zola in a computer—every time Steve thinks he’s grasped the whole incredible mess of it, it slips away from him into a near-hallucinatory rush of events, all of them dire and almost beyond belief. When he reaches the memories about just how Bucky’s survived into the 21st century, just what HYDRA has done to him, all his hysterical laughter leaves him and he just cries.

But Bucky is alive, he reminds himself. There are a few precious memories of him buried in the deluge, and Steve clings to those memories like they’re life rafts. Bucky all in white, missing his left arm and injured but smiling, his eyes that shade of impossibly perfect blue that hovers somewhere between slate and aquamarine, a color Steve has never been able to name much less recreate; Bucky in a new uniform with a dark metallic left arm, seamed with gold, giving him a solemn pre-battle nod; Bucky in the dim near-darkness of a bedroom, smiling at him, soft and sleepy, his hand in Steve’s.

Steve can deal with genocidal aliens and talking raccoons, so long as Bucky’s with him to marvel and goggle at all of it, so long as there’s even the smallest possibility of any of those memories coming true, so long as Bucky smiles at him again.

If Steve’s going to have to deal with the likes of talking raccoons and walking, talking trees though, he’s going to do it his way. He’s not going to let anyone shove him back into that old USO Cap suit again, the way they did before the battle, he’s not going to let the propaganda version of Captain America take over. He can admit that he’d been close to letting that happen out of sheer inertia. Being that shiny, buy war bonds version of Cap isn’t what’s going to get him through this. No, he’s gotta be that kid from Brooklyn who’s too dumb to run away from a fight, he’s gotta be the kind of idiot who always gets back up again, no matter how many times he’s been knocked down.

His future self had given up the shield for a while, had let it stop defining him, had stopped hiding behind it. The possibility is both exhilarating and terrifying, like all of Steve’s best decisions have been. He’ll need the shield for a while, he knows that, but now he knows there can be something beyond it, a life for Steve Rogers. And god, he wants that. He wants it more than he’d ever wanted to go to war, he wants it nearly as much as he wants Bucky, and Peggy. Whatever it takes to get that life, he’ll do it.

With that decided, he begins the laborious task of trying to put his future self’s memories in some kind of order.

* * *

At first, it’s like a kind of jigsaw puzzle. Steve had done a lot of those as a kid when he’d been cooped up inside with one illness or another, and there’s the same kind of satisfaction in putting all these confusing, jumbled up memories in order, combined with the focus Steve had always brought to bear on chess matches and tactical plans.

_I can do this_ , he thinks. _I can figure all this out and stop it from happening._

But then he gets to the memories of Thanos, of what Thanos had done. He watches Bucky crumble to dust. He sees a world ravaged by genocide, an inconceivable scale of loss.

He can’t do this.

Steve staggers to the bathroom, certain that what little is in his stomach is about to come up, but it doesn’t, and he ends up doubled over, gasping for breath, his hot forehead pressed against the cool tile of the bathroom floor.

This is it, he thinks, this is insanity. Loki’s driven him crazy, or the head injury has, or maybe even the decades in the ice—

“Captain Rogers, forgive the intrusion, but I am programmed to take emergency action should any resident of this Tower be in imminent danger, and according to my sensors, you appear to be in significant distress. Shall I contact emergency medical services?”

The voice is familiar: cool and calm, with a plummy British accent, and it’s coming from the direction of the living room. JARVIS, Stark’s AI. Steve’s never heard it before, not in the last few weeks, but he _has_ heard it—in the memories from his future self.

“Sir, if you do not respond in the next five seconds, I will contact Mr. Stark and emergency medical services.”

The words are a jolt of reality, and Steve gets up off the bathroom floor. “I’m fine, JARVIS. No need to call anyone.”

Steve goes back to the living room and his notebooks, sits down again.

_Keep it together, Rogers. The universe, apparently, is counting on you._

He gets to work.

* * *

Once he has a preliminary timeline sketched out, Steve comes to two conclusions: 1) there’s no way this is some plot of Loki’s, or Steve’s own insanity. It’s too bizarre, too detailed, too full of people and events that are wilder even than anything out of Bucky’s old pulp novels. And 2) there is no way Steve can handle this on his own.

Steve could conceivably rescue Bucky on his own—he’d done it once before, after all, and the odds then had been even worse—but taking down all of HYDRA when they’ve insinuated themselves in agencies and governments all over the world, dealing with these Infinity Stones, stopping Thanos before he can _destroy half of all life in the universe_ …Steve is painfully aware that all of that is entirely beyond him.

He’s going to have to bring other people in on this, and he’s going to have to find a way to make them believe him.

But first, he needs some kind of outside confirmation, something he can point to as evidence, because otherwise, Captain America or not, they’re going to send him to the loony bin.

* * *

Steve starts with the things he can look up himself—the internet, so helpful—and finds some confirmation, enough that he can be reasonably sure he hasn’t made things up out of whole cloth in some fit of astonishingly creative madness. There is, for example, a prince of the small African nation of Wakanda named T’Challa, and Steve definitely hadn’t known that before his future self gave him that memory. Steve finds corroboration of other names and events too: Hank Pym is a real person, and he’d been associated with SHIELD, there’s an actual Dr. Stephen Strange who’s a neurosurgeon in Manhattan, and Scott Lang is real too, recently tried and convicted of larceny out in California. There’s no reason Steve would have known any of their names before his run-in with his future self.

It’s still not likely to be enough to convince Fury or Tony or Natasha. They’ll conclude it’s all thanks to Loki, and maybe they wouldn’t be wrong. It’ll take something real and obvious and undeniable to convince anyone else, and Steve’s not sure how the hell to even start untangling all this mess to get that kind of proof, whether it even can be untangled before it all ends with Thanos snapping his fingers.

For a moment, he has the wild urge to just go find Bucky, free him from the frozen hell HYDRA is keeping the Winter Soldier in, and go on the run with him, taking out HYDRA when and where they can. Steve could leave his intel for Tony and Natasha, and surely they’ll believe it eventually, when enough of the events future Steve had lived through happen again. Because Steve can carry the shield, and he can carry Bucky and a squad, but dear god, he cannot carry the fate of half of the entire universe. He just can’t.

So just what the hell is he going to do?

* * *

He ends up visiting Peggy. He feels like some kind of fugitive as he slips out of the Tower to go to the train station just after dawn, where he takes the first train down to DC. Manhattan is only just lurching back to its feet after the blow of the battle, a big chunk of Midtown battered and unsteady and still in shock, and Steve should be helping here, he should be clearing wreckage or helping rebuild. Instead, he’s running off to see Peggy.

It’s the right thing to do, or at least, it’s not the worst thing he could be doing. If these future memories are right, Loki’s invasion was just one skirmish in a much, much bigger war. And while the history books may call Steve the greatest tactical mind of his generation now, it had always been Peggy who’d been the unerring point of his compass, Peggy who’d given his plans much needed direction and focus. And it had been Bucky who’d made sure the Howlies survived them.

Steve’s pretty sure the only way he’ll get through this new war to come is with both of their help.

So yeah, Steve’s visiting Peggy. She’s in a care facility in the suburbs of Washington D.C., a lovely place that nonetheless seems too much like the genteel, 21st century version of a sanitarium, even though Steve knows the residents need both the security and care offered there. He’s visited Peggy there a handful of times already, and it’s been heartbreaking every time. Worth it, of course it’s been worth it, but the sheer enormity of the years Steve has lost hits him with full force every time he sees her, a blow he could bear, if not for the raging grief that follows.

He’d never wanted to miss all those years with her. And yet, he has missed them, and he can never get them back. They’re her years too, after all, and she’s spent them well: building SHIELD and a family, breaking past every barrier anyone set against her. He doesn’t begrudge her those years. He only wishes he could have lived them with her.

He wishes too that time hadn’t exacted such a brutal price from Peggy. It’s been almost seventy years, she’s over 90 years old, of course she’s frail, of course her memory’s not what it was, and yet—some days she doesn’t quite remember him, or doesn’t know what year it is. Half the time he has to tell her again how he’s survived. She is, clearly and unmistakably, in decline.

The other half of the time though, she’s just as sharp as she’s always been. She’s still Peggy. And if anyone can help Steve figure out what to do, how to save half of the universe and Bucky, it’s her.

Today’s a good day, at least: Peggy knows him when she sees him, reaching out a hand to him with a smile.

“Steve! I’ve seen the news, I’m so glad you’re alright, darling. But you didn’t need to come visit me, I’m sure there’s still so much to be done in New York. An alien invasion, of all things,” she says, something almost like wonder in her voice.

Steve takes her hand, presses a lingering kiss to her knuckles. “Took a knock to the head, but they’ve benched me for a couple of days just to be safe. I’m fine, I promise, just thought I’d come visit my best girl.”

Peggy narrows her eyes at him. She always could see right through him, and he’s never been much of a liar.

“I’m old, not an idiot. If you’re up and about, you didn’t take too bad of a hit. What’s wrong? Beyond the alien invasion, I mean.”

On the train ride here, he’d wondered how the hell he was going to break this to her, where to start, if she’d even believe him. He’d considered couching it all in hypotheticals, asking for her advice in some vague way that wouldn’t give away just why he was asking. Faced with her steady and fierce brown eyes now, he discards that option.

“Why did Zola end up working for SHIELD?” he asks.

Peggy closes her eyes briefly and sighs. “Ah. You found out about Project Paperclip.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“I won’t make excuses to you,” says Peggy, meeting his eyes. “I objected to it, fought it, and I was overruled. Everyone assured me, _Howard_ assured me, that Zola could best repay his debt to the world by using his intellect in our service, rather than by rotting away in a prison. Well. Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn’t. All I know is it was one of the many compromises I had to make at SHIELD, and it was one of the ones I was least happy about.”

“You were right to be unhappy about it,” says Steve. “I’m not sure if it’s all thanks to Zola, but HYDRA has infiltrated SHIELD.”

“What? How? Zola died in the 70s, and most of the Project Paperclip scientists were scattered far and wide, to prevent any of them from conspiring together.”

“I haven’t got all the details, but I guess we didn’t burn off nearly enough of HYDRA’s heads. Maybe they stepped up their recruitment efforts, or maybe they were more widespread than we ever thought. I know they killed Howard, after he managed to recreate the serum. He had six samples of it in his car the night he died.”

Peggy goes pale, and Steve has half a second to think he’s made a terrible mistake, bringing all this to a woman in her condition.

“Oh that bloody idiot,” she breathes. “How did he even—I destroyed the last sample of your blood you know, to prevent that very thing, and he—HYDRA? You’re sure?”

“I heard a SHIELD agent say ‘hail HYDRA,’ and not as some kinda terrible joke. And Tony Stark has found some suspicious files in SHIELD’s systems.”

He’s stretching the truth there: Tony _will_ find those files, hopefully, but he hasn’t, not yet.

“Steve, why are you lying to me?” asks Peggy slowly, her tone dangerous, her eyes narrowing. Dammit. He’s not the best liar in the first place, and he’s never been able to lie to Peggy. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“It’s really crazy, Peggy,” he admits. “I don’t—this is even more nuts than aliens.”

“Tell me,” she demands.

“I got a visit from my future self. From 2024. And he—” God, having to explain the damned scepter and the Mind Stone at this point is too much. “He told me things.”

Peggy laughs, half furious and half incredulous, but when Steve doesn’t laugh with her, she studies him closely.

“Nothing good, I imagine. One’s future self doesn’t visit you to relay glad tidings,” Peggy says, her tone balanced perfectly between wry and shocked.

“You believe me?”

Peggy raises an eyebrow. “I doubt you’d joke about this, especially not to me.”

“No, I mean—you don’t think I’ve lost my marbles.”

“I trust you. I trust your judgment, and today, at least, I trust mine. You don’t seem mad to me, Steve.”

“Glad you think so, because I’ve been feeling pretty crazy, Pegs,” he admits.

“You’ve already verified what you can, I’m sure, enough to be certain you aren’t really going mad.”

The relief that fills him from head to toe is almost enough to leave him shaky. “Yeah. I confirmed some names and events, stuff I’m sure I couldn’t have known otherwise. It’s enough that I’m pretty sure I’m not just having a nervous breakdown. It’s just that it still feels an awful lot like I am.”

“Well then, tell me everything that future-Steve told you.”

So he does.

* * *

He tries to keep it brief, mindful that Peggy tires easily, that her mind might wander. She interrupts to ask clarifying questions every so often, and sometimes they’re keen questions, but other times she just needs him to repeat a name or remind her who he’s talking about. When he tells her about Bucky though, her eyes fill with tears that spill over.

“Oh Steve,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry. We should have looked for him, after he fell. I should have—”

Steve shakes his head. “You couldn’t have known, Peggy. None of us could’ve known he’d survive that fall, or that HYDRA would find him.”

“And now HYDRA has had him for decades.” Peggy takes Steve’s hand, grips it tight, her eyes suddenly urgent. “You know whatever he’s done, whatever they’ve made him do, it’s not his fault. One of their scientists, Fenhoff, he could control people, make them believe things that weren’t true. Undoubtedly others involved in this Winter Soldier project could do similar things. You must make sure he knows, when you get him back.”

When, not if. He holds onto that _when_ like it’s a prayer in one word, one phrase: _when you get him back_. 

“I know, and I’ll make sure he knows too,” says Steve, his every muscle wanting to jump into action, to run, to go to Bucky and fight every HYDRA agent who got in his way. He can’t of course, not yet. But the thought of Bucky so cruelly imprisoned, both in body and mind, is enough to make him frantic with the need to _do_ something. “Future me told me they’ve taken Bucky’s memories. He’s—he’s frozen right now, in cryostasis. I know where. But Peggy, there’s so much more going on.”

“Tell me.”

With the starting point of the Tesseract, he does his best to relay the whole unbelievable story of the Infinity Stones, and what the mad alien Thanos will do with them if he’s not stopped.

“Half of the entire universe?” says Peggy faintly.

“Yeah. It’s—it’s so big I don’t even know where to start. There are so many people and events involved, half of them in _space_ apparently, and it’s—it’s too much,” Steve admits, head in his hands. “I can’t come up with a tactical plan for this, I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“You can’t come up with a plan on your own, no. So tell your new team, those people you fought aliens with. Tell Nick Fury, he can be trusted. Steve, you don’t have to do this alone. Surely your future self didn’t expect you to.”

“No, he didn’t. I think—I think he wants me to avoid some of his mistakes.”

Said mistakes, Steve realizes, mostly boil down to _just fucking talk to people, Rogers. Be honest with them._ Future Steve hadn’t actually _said_ that, but Steve’s capable of some self-reflection, especially when it comes courtesy of a glimpse at so many of his failures.

He can’t let Bucky down again, for one. He has to tell Bucky that he loves him, that he wants him. God, all those times Steve had been a prickly asshole to him, resisting Bucky’s easy affection and generous heart, all those times he’d seen how the war was taking a toll on Bucky and done nothing but ineffectually pat Bucky on the shoulder or crack some dumb joke. He’s going to do better, this time. 

But he has to tell Tony just who killed his parents and why too, and he has to keep both Bucky and Tony safe in that aftermath. He has to trust Natasha, he has to actually make friends, he has to stop hiding behind the shield and the remnants of the Arctic ice. And on top of all that, he has to save the universe and somehow use his future self’s whole HYDRA ruse to best effect. God, Steve really hates himself right about now.

“Oh Steve, what a heavy load you’re carrying. This is a burden, darling, of course it is, but it’s also a gift, in so many ways. None of us can ever go back, nor should we, but you have the chance to undo your regrets before you even have them. Don’t waste it.”

“Wish I could’ve gone back though,” he tells her. “Lotta regrets I’d have undone before the ice.”

Peggy smiles, her eyes watery. “Well, time travel, alternate universes—they’re all real, apparently. Maybe there’s some kinder world where you have. But you’re stuck with this world for now, dear. You ought to get to work on making sure it doesn’t end.” She sighs, leans her head back against her raised bed, a familiar twist of frustration on her still-lovely lips. “I only wish I could help you more. But I’m at the end of my journey, and my mind isn’t what it was.”

“Hey now, you’re still sharp as a tack, Peg. No one else I’d rather come to for advice.”

She snorts and waves a dismissive, tired hand. “Kind of you to say, dear, but we both know there’s every chance I won’t remember any of this when you visit the next time.” She smiles at him again, bright and bold. “So one last time: do as Peggy says, darling. Trust your team, save Bucky, and the rest will become more clear. I trust Bucky will keep you from doing anything too idiotic, at any rate. And as for HYDRA and SHIELD…well, I think I can offer you some tips there.”

* * *

On the train ride back to New York, Steve’s filled with the anticipatory calm of being en route to a battle or mission.

_You may have years yet to avoid the business with the mad purple alien, but unfortunately darling, you won’t have the luxury of time to deal with HYDRA. Not unless you can truly commit to a longterm undercover operation,_ Peggy had told him.

_I can’t_ , Steve had admitted. _So we’ll have to take HYDRA down hard and fast_.

And the best way to do that, they had determined, was to swiftly starve HYDRA of its resources and deprive it of its strategic leaders, and bring all of HYDRA into the light so they could no longer hide. Steve will have to use the cover his future self has left him with for as long as he can get it to last. Long enough, hopefully, to break Bucky out of HYDRA’s hold and get the scepter back. After that, it’ll be open war against HYDRA.

And after _that_ , the Avengers will have to start on a plan to deal with Thanos.

* * *

When Steve returns to the Tower, JARVIS greets his entrance into the private elevator with a faintly apologetic sounding yet still harmonious chime.

“Good evening, Captain Rogers. Mr. Stark has requested that I direct you to his laboratory upon your arrival, rather than returning you to your apartment. He has a matter of some urgency to discuss with you.”

“Alright, take me to his lab then.”

Steve’s first impression of Tony’s lab is one of controlled chaos, but after only a few seconds of taking it in, he realizes that’s not right. It’s a clean and organized space, it’s just full of equipment and things he doesn’t recognize, with multiple semi-transparent, or maybe holographic, screens on display, all crammed with information and data.

“Well Ca—Steve, you’ve led me down quite the rabbit hole,” says Tony, still looking at the array of screens surrounding him.

“Yeah? What’s that mean, exactly?”

“Well, it’s a reference to Alice in Wonderland, where she—”

“Yeah, I know, Alice in Wonderland was around when I was a kid. I meant, what kind of rabbit hole? What have you found?”

Tony’s tone is light, but when he turns away from his screens to face Steve, his expression is solemn, almost angry.

“Tell me what you thought I’d find first.”

Honesty, Steve reminds himself. He needs to be honest and open.

“HYDRA. I thought you’d find HYDRA.”

“That I did! Know what else I found?” says Tony, his cheery tone more and more at odds with his stormy expression.

“No,” says Steve, approaching the screens carefully. He can’t make heads or tails of them, apart from what looks like video taken somewhere in Stark Tower. “What else did you find?”

“Security footage of _two_ of you, walking around the Tower at the same time after the battle. And two of me too. All at the same time, while Loki was in custody and accounted for. JARVIS should’ve told me about it, but other me had the right override code.”

“My apologies, Sir, but by all biometric scans, the other you and the other Captain Rogers were indistinguishable from your current selves.”

“Oh thank god,” says Steve. Finally, the most objective confirmation he’s had so far. Then, “Wait, there was another you walking around too?”

“Yeah, he was in the lobby while I was having a mild cardiac event. And what the hell do you mean, _oh thank god_? Why were there two of _you_? Is this an invasion of the body snatchers situation here, or, wait, is this a mirrorverse thing? Were they our evil counterparts? Other Cap didn’t have a beard, but other me still had a goatee, and I have a goatee too!” Tony stops mid-gesticulation, his eyes going wide. “Wait, am _I_ the evil one?”

_This man will quite possibly save the universe_ , Steve reminds himself, and summons up every last bit of patience he has.

“Not sure what any of that means, but the other Steve, he was from the future. I’m guessing the other version of you was too.”

“Oh no,” says Tony, shaking his head. “No no no no, that’s bad, that’s—how big do we fuck up that we have to come back to the past to fuck around with our past selves? That shouldn’t even be _possible_! Oh my god, did future me try to _kill me_ , is that what happened? And future you fought you! I saw it on the security footage! Was _he_ trying to kill _you_? They really were our mirrorverse selves!”

“I’m not sure what that means, but no, he wasn’t trying to kill me, and I’m the one who started the fight. I thought he was Loki. He and your future self, they were here for the scepter. They needed it—will need it?—to save the universe in the future.”

“The _universe_? Like, is that hyperbole, or—”

“It’s not hyperbole,” says Steve with a grimace. “They really needed it to save the universe. Well, half of the universe. It’s a pretty crazy story, but—I think it’s true. We need to get the team together, figure out what we’re going to do.”

Tony stares at him for a long moment, as if he’s still processing Steve’s words.

“Okay, despite the fact that you’ve had a recent head injury, in light of the evidence of my own damn security feeds, I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt here,” says Tony eventually, then he rubs at his hair and his face. The lines on his face are already deeper than they were when Steve had first met him just a couple of days ago. “But tell me how the hell you think we can triage things here Rogers, because from where I’m standing, half of Midtown’s in pretty bad shape and there’s a hell of a lot of post-alien invasion cleanup to do, there are apparently HYDRA moles or some other kind of terrorist organization embedded deep in SHIELD, and now we’ve got the end of the universe to worry about too?”

This is probably the time for a stirring Captain America speech. But had stirring speeches ever helped that other, future version of him and Tony? It didn’t seem like they had. Steve’s got a bunch of memories of them being at odds, clashing and talking past each other, most of their conversations barbed in some way, and they can’t afford that now. So for good or for ill, Steve’s just going to go with the raw and unlovely truth.

“HYDRA’s not just in SHIELD, they’re everywhere. Uh, also, HYDRA killed your parents and they used my best friend to do it, because they’ve had him captured and brainwashed as the Winter Soldier for the last seventy years, and I just—need you to not kill him or imprison him, please, because he didn’t do it of his own free will. And future me told HYDRA agents ‘hail HYDRA’ to get past them so now they think I’m one of them.”

Steve closes his eyes. He probably shouldn’t have blurted all of that out, but honestly, doing more or less the exact opposite of what his future self had done when it came to Tony Stark is the only idea he’s got right about now.

“What.”

God, why couldn’t his future self have stuck around to give a magic scepter-enabled debriefing to _everyone_?

“Can we please just call in the whole team, and Fury? I don’t want to have to explain this more than once.”

Tony’s face is still slack with shock, his mouth open and eyes wide. He doesn’t look furious, at least. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?

He blinks rapidly and says, “Alright, sure. Avengers assemble, I guess. I can call Rhodey too, right? Actually, I don’t need your permission, consider Rhodey my necessary emotional support to get through this. Now, tell me again, _who_ murdered my parents?”


	2. Chapter 2

Steve can’t call what follows the worst debrief of his life: that designation is reserved for the one after Bucky died—or after he was lost, apparently, since he’s not actually dead. Steve had barely gotten through that briefing, can’t even remember much about it now beyond the expression of terribly kind pity on Colonel Phillips’ face.

So this debrief isn’t anywhere near as bad as that, even if everyone looks at him as if he’s gone irretrievably insane, at least until Tony pulls up the security footage of the other Steve and Tony. Even then, there’s still doubt on everyone’s faces. The doubt only begins to give way to shock when Steve tells them things he shouldn’t be able to know: Barton’s wife’s name (Laura), Natasha’s cat’s name (Liho), the name Thanos, and the names of his daughters Gamora and Nebula.

Barton, fresh out of a round of intense examination and observation to make sure he’s clear of Loki’s influence, goes sickly pale the moment Steve mentions his family, though Natasha only narrows her eyes. Knowing Thanos’ name at all, or anything about the Infinity Stones, earns Steve some sharp questioning from Thor. Steve does his best to answer, though he feels like he’s missing at least two-thirds of the context necessary to even understand the knowledge and memories his future self had given him.

“So this Thanos guy is real,” says Natasha.

“He is real, yes,” Thor says, his expression grave and concerned. “He is no one you want to meet. Many call him the Mad Titan, and he has destroyed many worlds already.” Thor stands, somehow managing to make his cape swirl elegantly as he turns to leave. “I must retrieve the Tesseract and return it to Asgard, and consult with my father and the priestesses. Thank you for the gift of your foresight, Captain. The universe may yet avoid a terrible fate.”

“Wait, you’re just gonna leave?” demands Tony.

“I will return when I have more information. We have years yet to deal with Thanos, if what the Captain has told us is correct. I’ll be back soon enough, worry not!”

“Soon by his standards, or ours?” asks Natasha as Thor strides out of Tony’s lab.

“We’re not defenseless without him,” says Steve, then looks to Fury. “You should page Carol Danvers.”

Fury’s eyebrows go up. “Alright. So maybe time-traveling you from the future did pay you a visit. I already paged Danvers,” says Fury. “Paged her back when this alien invasion bullshit first started, just in case you all couldn’t get your shit together in enough time to save the world.”

“Rude,” says Tony, at the same time that Natasha shrugs and says, “That’s fair.”

“What I’m more immediately concerned about is this business with HYDRA,” adds Fury. “I’m finding it hard to believe that SHIELD has been infiltrated by HYDRA for decades, and that none of us noticed.”

“SHIELD put HYDRA scientists on payroll,” Steve says, flat and furious.

“Yeah, Project Paperclip, I know, but it’s a long way from a handful of scientists to a whole organization full of double agents.”

“So you’ll believe me about the rest, but not about that?” asks Steve.

“I need confirmation,” says Fury, and Colonel Rhodes nods in agreement. “Something’s clearly going on here, I’m not denying that. I just need some kind of verification, something that clearly matches up to what you’ve told us.”

“Yeah, no offense, Cap, I’m sure you’re not lying, I’m sure you believe all of this, but I think we need more confirmation than this. Something concrete, verifiable beyond some names you might’ve found out in other ways,” says Colonel Rhodes.

“What ways?” demands Steve. “Believe me, I’ve tried to come up with any other way I could know any of this, and I’ve come up empty.”

Rhodes raises his hands. “Hey, I hear you. But Thor’s an alien god, and there was just an alien invasion. There’s some room for an explanation that isn’t visits from time-traveling versions of you and Tony.”

“And Banner. Or Hulk, I should say. I’ve had JARVIS trawling through all the security feeds he can get his many digital hands on, and we’ve got an instance of two Hulks out and about at the same time. And I’ve got JARVIS digging for signs of HYDRA too.”

Steve clenches his fists and fights for calm. Does no one else feel the same urgency that he does?

“Look, I want some verifiable proof as much as everyone else does. I’m still not entirely sure I’m not just crazy, or that this isn’t just some kinda mischief of Loki’s. But I don’t know what would convince—”

Wait. Steve _does_ know. His future self had intended to make another stop in what was his past and Steve’s own present, and while it’s too late to intercept him now, Steve knows where he’d gone. Greenwich Village, Bleecker Street.

“What? Cap, what is it?”

“The Ancient One. She’s here in New York, on Bleecker Street, she has the Time Stone. If she’s real, if she confirms that future me returned the Time Stone to her, then that’s all the proof we need, isn’t it?”

Banner and Natasha frown, but nod slowly. Tony just claps. “Yay, field trip!”

Steve turns to Fury. “And if you want confirmation about HYDRA, then go to Camp Lehigh, the old SHIELD headquarters. That’s where Zola is.”

“Arnim Zola? Rogers, Zola’s been dead for decades—” starts Fury.

“I know,” Steve says. “But he preserved his consciousness somehow, and he’s in the computers in the basement sub levels of Camp Lehigh. He’s working on something down there, some kind of program that’s meant to identify HYDRA’s enemies, I don’t know, I didn’t entirely understand it. But he’s there, and if we want to take out HYDRA, we ought to start with him.”

“You have to know what this sounds like, Rogers,” says Romanoff, too gentle. “Even if there’s some truth in all of this, it’s—well, it sounds like a delusion. It sounds like Loki did something to you.”

“We can either sit here arguing over whether Steve’s crazy or not, or we can get confirmation, one way or another,” says Tony. “Camp Lehigh’s in Jersey, right? And it’s not like Greenwich Village is far. We go, we check things out, and then we take things from there.”

“Fine,” says Fury. “Stark, Rhodes, you’re coming with me to Jersey. The rest of you go visit this ‘Ancient One’ on Bleecker Street. We meet back here at 19:00.”

* * *

Steve, Banner, Romanoff and Barton pile into one of Stark’s enormous cars, one of the ones that’s like an especially luxurious tank, and go to Bleecker Street. The ride is tense and nearly silent; only Banner makes an attempt at conversation, and when it elicits little more than one-word responses, he winces and falls silent too. Steve feels kind of bad about it, but he’s just too damn nervous to talk. Either he’s about to find out that he’s gone irretrievably insane, or he’s about to find out that he hasn’t, and at this point, both options are equally terrifying. The others have their own reasons for silence: Barton probably shouldn’t even be here, should be on leave to recover from the ordeal with Loki, and all of Romanoff’s attention is on Steve, as if she can figure him out just by looking at him. Hell, maybe she can.

It’s a relief when they arrive at the address from future Steve’s memories, a stately looking building that takes up a whole corner of the block. The building facade is somewhat grimy, like its days of grandeur are long past, but it’s still lovely and grand, with a big circular window or skylight set into its top floor.

“Definitely looks like the kinda building someone called the Ancient One would live in,” says Barton, squinting up at it.

“It’s owned by some company called Sanctum Sanctorum LLC,” says Natasha. “Which also sounds like the kind of company that would own the building someone called the Ancient One would live in.”

“That’s really who owns it?” asks Steve. It seems awfully on the nose, and not at all discreet.

Natasha shrugs. “There are a lot of other shell companies and property transfer games involved, but yeah, at the end, that’s who owns it.”

“Huh,” Steve says, then he knocks on the door, and they wait for a response.

While they wait, Banner fidgets nervously. “Are we just supposed to ask for the Ancient One?”

“I guess so,” says Steve.

His future self’s memories aren’t clear on this point. They’re all secondhand knowledge from a future Bruce Banner, which in this particular moment, when he’s knocking on a door about to ask whoever answers it if he can speak to the Ancient One, seems like very little to go on.

Just when Steve’s beginning to really worry that no one’s going to answer, the door opens to reveal a bald woman in saffron-colored robes. She doesn’t look old, per se; her skin is smooth and her eyes are keen, and there’s no sign of infirmity in her slim frame’s easy and alert posture, but there’s something about her very agelessness that makes Steve think this is the Ancient One.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. I’m Steve Rogers, and these are my colleagues Dr. Bruce Banner, and Agents Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton. I’m here to speak with the Ancient One about the Infinity Stones.”

The woman sighs. “This is the third time I’ve seen you in the last couple of days, Captain Rogers, and every time, you have arrived to twist up the timeline in some new and regrettably exciting fashion. I grow tired of unsnarling these tangles, Captain.”

“But I’ve never met you,” protests Steve, giddy with something between elation and terror. So it really _is_ all true.

“And yet, _I_ have met _you_. A couple of different versions of you, even. Ah, Dr. Banner, how lovely to see you again.”

“I’ve—I’ve never met you either,” says Banner, almost apologetically. “So…are you the Ancient One?”

“I am,” she says with a graceful nod, then gestures them inside. “Come in. This isn’t the sort of conversation that should be had on the doorstep.”

But when she lets them in, she makes no move to show them into any kind of sitting room or office, and they all end up standing around the foyer awkwardly.

“So, not a doorstep kind of conversation, but definitely not a sit down and talk about it kind of conversation,” says Natasha.

“This won’t take long,” says the Ancient One.

“Well, that doesn’t sound good,” mutters Barton.

It really doesn’t.

Still, Steve rallies. “Can you tell us anything about the Infinity Stones, or about my, um, future self’s visit?”

The Ancient One raises one barely there eyebrow. “I think your future self has told you quite enough already, Captain. What I _can_ tell you is that thanks to the actions of your future selves, this timeline is officially no longer the one that will lead to the future those particular future selves inhabit.”

“That’s a good thing right? Because their future is the one where Thanos killed half of the universe. We know enough to avoid that by now,” says Steve.

“One hopes,” says the Ancient One. “I’ve certainly done what I can to disentangle the timelines your alternate self has created in such willy-nilly fashion. But I can do no more. Generally speaking, there are a finite number of potential futures. That finite number is in the millions, but nevertheless, it is finite. Had I the will, I could examine each branching timeline. Not so now. They are nearly all in flux.”

“Alright,” says Banner slowly, his forehead wrinkling with thought. “Is that…a good thing?”

The Ancient One smiles, serene and a little dangerous. It isn’t a comforting expression.

“It is chaos. And out of such chaos, beauty and order may yet arise. So can evil and entropy. We shall just have to see which it will be.”

“Uh huh,” says Natasha, evidently unimpressed and unsatisfied with this cryptic pronouncement. “So, about these Infinity Stones, can you at least tell us if our play should be destroying them so they can’t be used to kill half of the entire universe, or taking out Thanos instead?” she asks.

“Destroy the Stones and Thanos will still continue his slaughter the old-fashioned way,” says the Ancient One, shaking her head. “That was his intent with this week’s invasion.”

“But—that was Loki. Loki led the invasion,” says Barton.

“And Thanos is the one who supplied him with an army,” says the Ancient One, in the strained but patient tones of a teacher.

“Okay, it seems clear enough. We need to secure the Stones against Thanos, and then we need to take Thanos out,” says Steve.

It sounds easy, laid out like that: clear and simple objectives, a mission brief that, if you didn’t know anything about Thanos, was downright earthly and normal. But the stakes are still half of the entire universe, and the field of battle stretches across galaxies. There’s a moment of collective, overwhelmed silence as they all contemplate that.

“But we have to deal with this secret Nazis situation first,” says Natasha.

“Fuck,” Barton says quietly, and Banner nods.

“HYDRA has one of the Infinity Stones: the one in the scepter. So…two birds, one stone? We can do this, you guys,” tries Steve, in an admittedly lackluster attempt at a motivational speech.

“Well, you’re not likely to make things _worse_ than they became in that other timeline,” says the Ancient One.

Banner groans. “You just had to say that, didn’t you.”

* * *

When it comes time to regroup at Stark Tower, Banner’s looking strained and faintly green, so he excuses himself to go meditate, and Barton follows, just in case the Hulk does end up making an appearance. JARVIS directs Steve and Natasha to Tony’s lab, where Tony and Rhodes are stepping out of their suspiciously singed and smoking armored suits.

“What the hell happened in Jersey?” Natasha asks them. “And where’s Fury?”

“So, good news: Cap’s not crazy,” says Tony. “But also, bad news: Cap’s not crazy! HYDRA’s everywhere and they killed my parents and half of the universe is going to be genocided in six years and I need a drink, I need _so many drinks_ , but I think we just started a war and—”

Natasha looks like she’s this close to slapping the rising hysteria out of Tony, so Steve interrupts with a sharp, “Tony! _Where’s Fury_?”

“On his way to the Triskelion to start taking measures against HYDRA,” says Rhodes, as Tony heads for the small icebox tucked away in the lab, where he pulls out a bottle of something and takes long swallows from it. “We took out Zola, but uh, we weren’t all that subtle about it. _Someone—_ ” Rhodes glares over at Tony, his expression somewhere between frazzled and still in a kind of shock, then he continues, “Lost his shit when Zola told him about his parents.”

“Go back to the you think you just started a war part,” demands Natasha.

Rhodes sighs and rubs at his forehead like he has a headache. “Like I said, we weren’t subtle.”

“Hey! He was about to send a couple ICBMs our way! So I blew up the bunker,” says Tony. “Zola just kept going on and on with his evil villain speech, and the shit he said about my _mom_ —” Tony paces, gripping at his hair and tugging it, choking down a shout of distress or rage. “And I don’t know _what_ the fuck my dear old dad was doing other than playing right into HYDRA’s goddamn hands. Zola mentioned your BFF too, Steve. Really seemed to get off on telling me that Dad’s old war buddy was the puppet HYDRA used to kill him. Blah blah ‘your father’s legacy is nothing but destruction and now I will destroy even his greatest creation’…”

“Tony—about Bucky—”

Tony just barrels on, still pacing. “But the interesting thing was, Zola didn’t know about you. He was networked down there, had some lines out to the real world and I had JARVIS track them, scoop up all the recent network activity and every single packet that went down them, but they weren’t exactly high-speed internet lines, and Zola wasn’t exactly running on modern tech. He was stuck on miles and miles of magnetic tape, nothing like JARVIS—”

“Get to the point, Stark!” snaps Natasha, and Tony stops pacing, turns to Steve with wide eyes, practically burning with urgency.

“ _He didn’t know that you’ve been defrosted_. Your cover hasn’t been blown, Steve, which is good because _you need to stall_.”

“Stall? Stall _what_ , stall who?” demands Steve.

“Fury needs time to get everyone who’s not HYDRA ready to move against them, and we need time for JARVIS and Tony to finish going through all the data we got from Zola. We need to put off an all-out war for as long as we can. So when Sitwell or whoever calls you, you _need to stall_ ,” says Rhodes. “Whatever they say about what just went down in Camp Lehigh, whatever they want you to do or whatever questions they ask, you need to talk your way out of it, stall. Anything to buy us time, get us intel.”

Steve nods, already trying to come up with excuses and explanations for Sitwell, though he feels nearly dizzy with it, as if it’s not his body that just got off the Cyclone, but his brain. Everything’s moving too damn fast. The Infinity Stones and Bucky and HYDRA… 

Natasha sucks in a sharp breath. “Shit, your _phone_ , if it’s compromised then HYDRA’s had location data on you this whole time—”

“I don’t have it,” Steve tells her, just as Natasha’s own phone buzzes in her pocket, and she pulls out a sleek rectangle of glass that Steve can scarcely credit as any kind of communication device. SHIELD certainly hadn’t given him any such thing; his phone is a flimsy plasticky thing, like a much smaller handie-talkie with more buttons, and he’d left it in his doubtlessly surveilled apartment before coming to Stark Tower.

She looks down at it, then looks up at him. “It’s Sitwell.” She sets the phone on the table and taps a button. “Romanoff.”

“Do you have eyes on Rogers?” comes Sitwell’s voice from the phone. “He’s not answering his phone, not his home or his cell. I have Rumlow en route to his apartment—”

“Woah, you don’t need to call in Delta Strike. Rogers is from the 30s, remember? Even odds he just forgot his phone, he’s not used to it yet. He’s probably at the gym punching away his feelings.”

Steve makes a face at her, and she raises her eyebrows, a silent _am I wrong_?

“And he had a recent head injury, so forgive me for being cautious,” comes Sitwell’s voice, clipped and unamused. “Do you have eyes on him or not?”

Romanoff looks at Steve, their eyes very much on each other. “No, I’m at Stark Tower. What do you need Rogers for? I’m sure he’s fine, but he’s still got a day before Medical will clear him for duty.”

“That’s need to know, Romanoff,” says Sitwell, and hangs up.

“So, okay,” Rhodes says, arms crossed and nodding. “Okay! You’re up, Cap. Stall them, get all the intel you can. Buy us time. Got it?”

Steve nods, overwhelmed, and Tony tosses him a phone, one of the shiny rectangle looking ones, then a little circular case. “Secure StarkPhone, only call us from that. And the earbuds are comms, with a direct line to JARVIS. Shit, do you even know what earbuds are—?”

“I’ll—I’ll figure it out!” says Steve, and shoves it all in his pockets.

“We don’t have time to give him a crash course,” says Natasha. “Steve, you need to be back at your apartment by the time Rumlow gets there.”

“Go, Steve, go go go,” Tony tells him. “There’s a motorcycle in the garage, JARVIS will take you there.”

Steve turns to go, but he has to know. “Tony, are we good? Or are you gonna—”

“Go after your bestie?” Tony shakes his head, his jaw tight with anger. “Not after Zola’s delightfully sadistic little speech! We’ll follow the same protocol as we did with Barton when Loki had him.” Steve searches his expression, looking for any hint of a lie, and Tony rolls his eyes. “We’re on the same page, Steve, I promise. Now go!”

Steve goes.

* * *

Steve breaks what has to be every single traffic law to get back to his apartment, and arrives a couple minutes before Rumlow knocks on his door. It’s just enough time to start the shower running, change into something that can pass for exercise clothes, stick his head under the shower’s now steaming spray, and then throw a towel around his neck.

“Cap? You in there? Everything alright? It’s Agent Rumlow, from SHIELD.” There’s a pause, and he adds, “You know, the guy you barfed on. You’re needed back at HQ, Secretary Pierce wants a debriefing before he heads back to DC.”

Jesus, is the guy really going to hold the post-head injury vomiting thing against Steve? What an asshole.

“Coming!” he calls out. “I’ll be out in a moment!”

When he opens the door, Rumlow greets him with a shark-like smile, all teeth and the hunt, no warmth.

“Everything okay, Cap?” asks Rumlow.

Steve gives him his best polite Captain America smile. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You weren’t answering your cell phone.”

“My wha—oh, right, the—the little portable telephone. Sorry, I forgot all about it. I was at the gym, then I went out for a long walk, lost track of time. Still getting used to this century, you know? Uh, hail HYDRA.”

Shit, that probably wasn’t the appropriate time to say that.

“Right,” says Rumlow slowly. “Hail HYDRA. Anyway, keeping that little portable phone on you is non-negotiable. Now come on, get changed. We gotta meet Pierce in 30, and he’s not a man who’s forgiving of tardiness.”

“Sure,” says Steve easily. “I’ll be ready in three.”

He gets some SHIELD appropriate clothes on in a minute ten, then spends the rest of the time wrestling with the earbuds Tony had given him. They’re tiny, which is good because it means they won’t be obvious, but Steve fumbles trying to get them in, and once he does, he jumps when JARVIS’ smooth voice greets him.

“Good evening, Captain. You only need to keep one communicator in at a time, the other is an extra.”

“Right,” Steve whispers, and fishes the earbud back out of his right ear.

He puts the extra earbud back in its case, and stuffs it in his underwear drawer. Then he fills his pockets with his two phones, his wallet, his keys, wishes for a gun and settles for a knife he hides in the waistband of his pants—just in case—as JARVIS says, “I will monitor your feed, in case of emergency, however, I’m afraid I do not currently have the computing resources available to provide further support.”

“That’s fine, JARVIS, I can manage,” Steve mutters as he shoves his feet into his shoes, and really hopes that he can in fact manage.

Steve goes back out with ten seconds to spare to find Rumlow shamelessly snooping in his sketchbook where it’s sitting on the kitchen table, and Steve very nearly lunges towards him to snatch it from his hands. But that’s the instinct of Steve’s younger and scrappier days. His adult self knows that’s exactly the kind of reaction bullies like Rumlow want, and he can see that Rumlow’s at the non-incriminating parts of the book—his most recent sketches of buildings, the view from his apartment, a flock of pigeons—so there’s no point in tipping him off about the incriminating parts further in. The sketches of Peggy and Bucky give too much away—about Steve himself more than about Peggy and Bucky—too attentive and loving and intimate by far. Rumlow can’t see those sketches.

“I’m ready, let’s go,” he says. “Don’t want to keep Secretary Pierce waiting.”

Rumlow looks up and nods peaceably enough. “Alright, let’s go. Got your phone this time, Cap?”

Rumlow’s tone is distinctly patronizing, but Steve just smiles insincerely and pats at his pocket. “I do, thank you,” he says, and they head out.

There’s a hulking black tank of a car waiting for them downstairs and Rumlow takes the front seat, leaving Steve in the back. It’s only once the driver—one of the other guys from the STRIKE team, Steve recognizes his face but doesn’t remember his name—has pulled into traffic that Rumlow starts talking.

“So we have a situation. Do you know what Stark’s up to right now?”

Steve does his best not to react. “Helping with the clean up from the invasion, I imagine,” he says.

“Yeah, no. Somehow, he knew where the base at Camp Lehigh was.” Rumlow throws Steve a shrewd glance from over his shoulder. “Guessing that HYDRA base must’ve been there since your time?” Steve makes a noncommittal noise, just enough to keep Rumlow talking, and it works. “Anyway, Stark found it and blew it the fuck up. Pierce is pissed, wants to know how the hell it happened. Was it an Avengers op?”

“Not that I know about, but it’s not like Stark’s a team player. The Avengers are a team in name only. What’s SHIELD’s response?”

“Nothing so far, looks like it’s being kept quiet.”

“Has HYDRA been compromised?”

“You tell me. I got the surprise of my life when Captain Goddamn America hail HYDRA’d me. How’s that work, anyway? Is this some kinda the history books were all wrong deal?”

“Something like that,” hedges Steve. “Let’s just say, HYDRA’s always had a presence in the US.”

“Yeah?” asks Rumlow, eager and curious now.

Steve fixes him with his most quelling superior officer look. “If you were supposed to know, you’d know,” he says.

From what Steve can see of his face in the rearview mirror, Rumlow looks offended, but he also lets the rest of the ride pass in silence, so Steve counts his attempts at deflection as a success. Maybe he’ll be able to get through this whole thing by being a cryptic asshole. Peggy had told him that confidence and the right attitude could get him far. But then she’d also told him to have his cover established before he made his move, and, well. That’s clearly not happening.

 _Just stall, Rogers,_ he tells himself. _Stall, and find Bucky, and get the Mind Stone back if you have the chance._

* * *

The meeting with Pierce isn’t at SHIELD HQ. Instead, it’s in the lavish penthouse suite of one of the most expensive hotels in Manhattan. It’s a suite fit for a king, not for someone who’s ostensibly a public servant, albeit a high-ranked one. There’s even a whole sitting room, for god’s sake, where the remnants of a room service meal are still spread out across the coffee table.

“Captain Rogers, thank you for coming to see me,” says Pierce, as if Steve’s making a social call instead of having been ordered to meet with Pierce.

“Of course,” Steve says. “I hadn’t realized we were colleagues. Hail HYDRA.”

Dammit. Still not the right time for that, judging by the brief wrinkle in Pierce’s forehead. “Yes, yes, hail HYDRA,” says Pierce, as Rumlow, the asshole, snaps off a crisp salute and a brisk _hail HYDRA_.

Proper hail HYDRA salute or not, Pierce dismisses Rumlow with a curt nod and an order to figure out who else at SHIELD knows about the attack at Camp Lehigh. Once Rumlow’s gone, Pierce gestures Steve towards the couch, a piece of furniture so sleek that it doesn’t seem like it’s meant for sitting on, while he takes the throne-like armchair.

Steve sits, dearly hoping there’s no additional secret HYDRA handshake, and that he’s not missing some vital knowledge about Pierce that will blow his cover. His future self’s memories about the man are light on detail and heavy on rage. There’s no specific memory attached to the knowledge, but Steve just knows: this man has hurt Bucky, has ordered and overseen his suffering, has maybe even enjoyed it. Steve thought he’d gotten all the revenge he could against HYDRA, when he’d taken out HYDRA base after HYDRA base before taking out Schmidt and bringing down the Valkyrie. Apparently, that had only been the beginning. Steve’s more than willing to finish the job now.

Pierce offers him a drink that he declines, and asks a few perfunctory questions about the status of the post-invasion cleanup. Steve, mindful of his mandate to stall, answers with as much longwinded thoroughness as possible, trying not to fidget or twitch under Pierce’s keen and almost greedy stare. Despite Steve’s attempts to stall, it doesn’t take long before Pierce gets down to HYDRA business.

“I have to say, I wasn’t expecting Captain America to be a member of HYDRA, given that Captain America famously destroyed some of its most significant and important heads.”

“Oh, you know, destroy one, two more shall grow in its place, right?” says Steve, and Pierce just keeps staring at him, eyes as flat and unforgiving as a snake’s. Right, clearly Pierce is not the joking kind. Steve clears his throat and continues, “The American and German branches of HYDRA had some serious differences of opinion, I guess you can say. Schmidt and his people, they weren’t much more than nut job cultists who believed in the occult. We here at American HYDRA believe in science, don’t we?”

Steve really hopes that sounds like a chummy rhetorical question and not the actual question it really is, because Steve has no idea what the American branch of HYDRA does or doesn’t believe. He’s making all of this up as he goes along, pretty much. He’s really, really hoping that the sheer improbability of _Captain America_ attempting to go under cover as HYDRA will keep anyone from getting too suspicious, at least for now.

Pierce laughs, some of the snake-like readiness to strike easing from his stare. “That’s true, some of our colleagues have had some quite outlandish ideas, haven’t they? Still, if HYDRA had a super soldier already, then I confess I’m quite at a loss as to why we still only have one, rather than thousands.”

“You have more than one,” says Steve. “You have the Winter Soldier, don’t you?”

Pierce sits back in his armchair, looking both faintly impressed and patronizing at the same time.

“You’re very well-informed for someone who was defrosted a few months ago,” he says, and waits. Steve’s wise to this trick of creating a silence and hoping someone else fills it, so he just maintains a cryptic expression until Pierce continues, “Yes, we have the Winter Soldier, but that’s a far cry from the army of enhanced soldiers HYDRA had hoped for.”

Steve smiles, and hopes that however crazed it looks comes across as in character for this ridiculous evil Nazi version of himself.

“I may be HYDRA, but Project Rebirth wasn’t. And Schmidt trying to get the serum for himself fucked us all over. Instead of having an in with the goose that laid the golden egg with Erskine, Schmidt had him killed and we had to make do with Zola’s second-rate work. So yeah, I went after Schmidt when I had the chance. He wasn’t doing the cause any good with his delusions of grandeur.”

Thankfully, this seems to satisfy Pierce a little, though there’s still some suspicion in his eyes. “Hmmm. I suppose not. Forgive me, this new knowledge is quite overturning all of my ideas about the Second World War and SHIELD, to say nothing of Captain America.”

This “new knowledge” isn’t going to stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny, what with it all being the product of Steve’s mid-op, flying by the seat of his pants lying, Steve realizes. If only he’d had more time, time to come up with a cover story that was more than his own frantic improvisation. He’d only barely gotten started building one with Peggy, and she’d cautioned him that he should plant some key documents and evidence to back up his cover. Oh well, frantic improvisation is what he’s got right now. And Steve needs to stall, sure, but he also needs to get everything he can out of HYDRA while the ruse holds, and he needs to get Bucky. He’s just going to have to plow ahead and move fast enough that Pierce and HYDRA don’t catch on.

“Well, I’ll be happy to give you a history lesson some time, but right now we have more pressing problems, according to what Rumlow told me. How the hell did Stark find out about the bunker at Camp Lehigh?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that.”

Steve shakes his head. “I had an unfortunate run in with Loki while he was trying to take the scepter, I took a bad knock on the head. I’ve been on mandated medical leave for a couple of days, I’m not up to speed with whatever’s going on with the Avengers. Do we not have anyone else close to the Initiative?”

His future self’s memories hadn’t suggested any moles close to the Avengers, but best to be sure.

“No. No one other than you, apparently. I don’t know how HYDRA’s been compromised, but it clearly has. We need to act fast.”

On this, Steve and Pierce are in agreement, though for wildly different reasons. Yeah, Steve needs to act fast. He needs to act fast enough to outrun all of his lies and save Bucky and destroy HYDRA before they notice any of it. He nods, hopefully the very image of evil Nazi professionalism.

“Of course. I can go back to Stark, figure out what’s going on. Once we know what he knows, why Stark went after the base, we can see what measures are necessary from there,” says Steve.

Pierce stands, and so does Steve. “Do let me know if you require any resources, Captain Rogers. You’ll have access to whatever and whoever you need to deal with this. If everything at Camp Lehigh has been destroyed, if Zola’s work is gone—” Pierce’s jaw clenches, rage turning his distinguished face ugly. “Then HYDRA’s plans have been set back by decades, and we can ill afford that.”

“How unfortunate,” says Steve, pressing his lips together to keep from grinning. “Let’s hope it hasn’t come to that.”

“Yes, let’s hope,” Pierce says, and sees him out of the hotel suite.

So that’s great, Steve’s just signed himself up to be a goddamn double agent. That counts as stalling and getting intel, right? Right.

* * *

One of Pierce’s men in yet another black tank of a car drives Steve back to Stark Tower. Steve spends the time formulating a plan. It’s about as crazy as his cover, but if he can just move fast enough, if he can keep even one step ahead of HYDRA, Steve thinks it can be done. He’ll save Bucky and get the Mind Stone back and burn HYDRA’s remaining heads to ash. And if he manages all of that, then how hard can saving the universe be?

* * *

When Steve returns to Stark Tower, JARVIS directs him back to Tony’s lab, where Tony, Banner, and Natasha appear to be going through digital data displayed on the clear screens in front of them. Before he can even say a word, Natasha darts over to him and pats him down, sticking her hands in his jacket and pants pockets.

“Natasha, what—”

He squirms as her hands roam to some decidedly uncomfortable places. When she fishes the SHIELD-provided phone out of his pocket, she puts a finger over her lips in a shushing gesture, then tosses the phone over to Tony, who rushes off to put it in what looks like a metal box.

In his earbud, JARVIS says, “One moment, Captain Rogers. We are scanning you and your devices for evidence of any surveillance equipment.” After a minute, JARVIS continues, “All surveillance equipment on Captain Rogers’ has been disabled, or its transmissions have been scrambled and disrupted.”

“Isn’t that going to be suspicious?” Steve asks.

“Nah,” says Natasha. “If there are any glitches with the bugs or any interruptions in their feeds, HYDRA will put it down to Tony’s tech. Just play dumb if someone asks you about it. Now, c’mon, tell us what happened.”

So he does, and for a few seconds, Natasha just blinks, while Tony groans. “Congratulations, you’re a real double agent now,” she says eventually.

“Yeah, I know.”

“So…what’s the plan from here?” asks Banner, wringing his hands.

“The plan is that I tell Pierce that Tony hacked into SHIELD’s systems while he was on the helicarrier, found… _something_ that pointed him to Camp Lehigh, and that now the Avengers are planning to take the scepter back because they believe SHIELD’s been compromised.”

“Alright,” says Tony slowly. “That’s all basically true though. Where does your part in this plan come in?”

“I tell Pierce I’ll be the one to secure the scepter before any of you get there. And I tell him that I’ll need the Winter Soldier’s help to do it. Then we go get the scepter, secure it in a location only the Avengers know about, and—” Well, that’s the part of the plan that Steve hasn’t worked out yet. “And the rest depends on you guys.”

“Rogers—Steve,” starts Natasha, careful and too gentle. “The Winter Soldier is too dangerous for you to—”

Steve shakes his head. “The Winter Soldier is _Bucky_. I know he’s gonna be confused, I know he’ll need time before he—before he remembers me, before he’s okay. But he’s _Bucky_ , and I need to get him free of HYDRA. And this way, I can walk right in there and get him out with no casualties.”

“Fine, okay, sure, whatever, but what the hell do we do after you’ve busted out your bestie, and you pull a double-cross over on HYDRA? Because if you want to save Barnes, that’s your cover blown, Steve,” says Tony. 

“There’s no way this cover’s lasting long anyway,” Steve argues. “Me being HYDRA is not going to stand up to any kind of scrutiny, so I have to take advantage of the cover while I have it.”

“It makes our timeline real tight,” says Natasha unhappily. “And we’re shorthanded too, Coulson’s dead, and Barton’s still…compromised. He’s in no shape to help more on this mission, Fury sent him home.”

“Is he okay?” asks Steve.

“He’ll be fine, he just needs some time. Time’s in short supply for us though.” 

“The timeline was already tight,” counters Steve, then looks to Tony. “How much more time do you need, Tony?”

“Another couple of days for JARVIS to finish crunching through all the data and for us to make any sense of it.”

“And Fury and I have managed to get access to HYDRA’s files that they’ve been hiding in SHIELD’s systems,” says Natasha. “You said some future version of me released all those files, right?”

“To get HYDRA out in the open, yeah.”

Natasha nods, her expression set in a kind of wry resolve. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It worked—will work—whatever, it seems to have done the job in at least one timeline. If I have a couple of days, I can pull together a better file dump, something more targeted than just dumping everything from SHIELD’s databases.”

“Alright,” Steve says. “So let’s work out the details.”

They work late into the night doing just that, with Fury calling in for an update. Fury has his hands more than full with making preparations to purge HYDRA from SHIELD’s ranks, and making discreet approaches to his colleagues in other agencies to tell them to do the same, so he doesn’t have too many objections to Steve’s plan.

“Just—get the scepter back, and try not to get killed by the Winter Soldier,” says Fury. “Danvers is on her way, we’ll figure out what to do about all this Infinity Stones, end of the universe shit when she gets here.”

“What’s her ETA?” asks Steve.

“Two weeks at least. So let’s try to have this HYDRA bullshit handled by then, alright?”

* * *

Despite being pressed for time, Natasha insists on giving him some rushed double agent training.

“It’s not going to be nearly enough, but it’ll be better than nothing,” she says grimly.

“Hey, I’ve done covert ops before, you know,” he protests. “The Howlies were a commando squad!”

Still, he listens attentively as Natasha attempts to distill weeks’ worth of training into an hour. His main takeaway is to avoid any too-elaborate lies and to hew as closely to the truth as he can so he doesn’t trip himself up.

“In some ways, you’re lucky,” she says. “You’ve got the whole frozen for seventy years excuse, and that can take you far. Play dumb whenever you can, make sure you’re always reminding people that you’re fresh from the 40s. Now, let’s go over your cover story…”

She spends the rest of the hour drilling Steve on his thin cover story, before regretfully letting him go so she can return to working on the SHIELD data dump.

“This cover really isn’t going to hold up for long,” she warns.

“I know. But it just needs to last long enough for me to rescue Bucky, and retrieve the Mind Stone. Anything more than that is a bonus,” he says. “I’ll try to get you and Tony as much time as possible though. Thank you for helping me with this whole double agent plan.”

Natasha smiles, a wry and almost bitter kind of curve to her lips that’s inviting Steve into some dark joke.

“You’re welcome. You know, some people would think it’s pretty rich that I’m giving you double agent tips.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“Pretty sure a big chunk of the non-HYDRA part of SHIELD still thinks _I’m_ a double agent.”

“I know you’re not,” Steve tells her.

The thought of not trusting Natasha is about as impossible as not trusting Peggy, or Bucky. He’s only known her for a few days in this timeline, but his future self’s rock-solid certainty in Natasha has taken quick root in Steve now.

“What, because of future you’s memories?” says Natasha, raising an eyebrow. “Who’s to say I didn’t fool him too?”

She’s shooting for sly and teasing, but Steve can hear the tremor of uncertainty underneath. She looks very young to him right now, and with a jolt, Steve realizes that she is in fact young, that her cool and easy assurance is at least partly a facade. It had taken a while for the other, future Steve to realize that, to see the Natasha underneath her careful, constructed masks. Steve’s glad it won’t take so long for him.

“I think future me knew—knows?—exactly who you are, Natasha. I got the impression she was the only reason he made it through half of the universe being killed.”

Natasha goes still and startled, and for the first time, she looks something close to afraid. Tenderness rises up in Steve: for Natasha as she is now, and the Natasha who some other version of Steve had loved so fiercely. In that other, future timeline, the one Steve hopes to avert, Natasha never gave up. Not on him, and not on saving people. Trusting her now seems like the least he can do to honor that knowledge, and her sacrifice. A sacrifice that he really, really hopes won’t be necessary now.

“You didn’t mention much personal stuff in your recap of the terrible future we have to prevent,” says Natasha, her voice just the slightest bit shaky.

“Future me tried to keep it to the important tactical intel, but things leaked through. Enough that—that I know I can trust you.”

“And that doesn’t make you feel crazy? Because I feel like that makes you crazy, Steve.”

“Nah,” he says with a grin. “One of the sanest choices I’ve made since this whole thing started, really.”

Natasha laughs, and she looks lighter, a weight lifting from her shoulders that Steve hadn’t even noticed was there in the first place.

“Well, maybe a little insanity is what we need to get through this.”

* * *

The next day, after as much frantic planning as the Avengers can manage, Steve arranges for another meeting with Pierce through Rumlow, and isn’t sure whether he should be gratified or alarmed by the speed with which Pierce responds. Pierce wants Steve at his suite in half an hour, and it’s only thanks to supersoldier speed that Steve manages it. He arrives off-balance and nearly out of breath, which is probably the point.

He gives Pierce a terse report of the agreed-upon cover story, which is about half truths and half lies: that Tony hacked into SHIELD’s systems when he was on the helicarrier, found evidence of HYDRA, dug deeper and followed the trail to Camp Lehigh and Zola, who told him that HYDRA had killed his parents before Tony destroyed him in a fit of rage.

“Stark is tracking down the scepter as we speak, Secretary Pierce. We need to secure it immediately, and relocate it somewhere neither SHIELD or the Avengers can find it,” concludes Steve.

Pierce inhales sharply, his jaw clenching as he processes Steve’s report. “Are the other Avengers involved? Does Fury know?”

“No, Stark’s only told me, Rhodes, and Banner, he doesn’t trust anyone else associated with SHIELD.”

“But he trusts you?”

“He doesn’t like me, but he trusts me not to be HYDRA. Propaganda is very effective, Mr. Pierce.”

“Too effective, perhaps,” murmurs Pierce, and Steve goes cold all over. Fuck, he needs this cover to last just a little longer, and it’s not going to if Pierce keeps considering things like logic. Steve can _see_ the wheels turning behind his eyes, wondering why the hell a HYDRA agent would go along with being anti-Nazi propaganda. Pierce doesn’t bring up any of those questions though, and instead asks, “Do you have a plan to secure the scepter and deal with Stark? Because if Stark decides to wage war against HYDRA at this particular moment, I’m not certain the situation can be contained.”

“It can be, sir. Stark and Rhodes will be going after the scepter alone. We can retrieve the scepter, use it on Stark and Rhodes, and get them under our control the way Barton was under Loki’s. Whatever Zola was working on, surely Stark can continue the work.”

Pierce’s eyebrows rise. “Bold,” he says. “Do you think you can use the scepter like that?”

Well, his future self had managed to use it to give Steve the fastest and most overwhelming briefing in history, so Steve figures that’s proof enough that he can, theoretically, use the thing if it comes down to it. That’s just enough truth that Steve can shrug, look Pierce in the eye, and lie with absolute conviction.

“I managed to use the Tesseract. Or did you think Schmidt died in the _crash_?” he says, in his best attempt at emulating Loki’s haughtiness along with Fury’s menacing mystery. Let Pierce wonder just what the hell that means, because Steve sure as hell doesn’t know.

Steve can only hope JARVIS is listening in on the comms right now, because Steve is not going to be able to keep up with his house of cards made of ever more cryptic asshole statements. If Pierce presses him on any of this, he has no goddamn idea what he’ll say.

“His body was never recovered,” murmurs Pierce, his eyes avid and greedy as they meet Steve’s. Steve tries to smile menacingly. “Alright, fine. You have a go to recover the scepter. I’ll make sure the STRIKE team’s resources are available, and Sitwell will alert the Sokovia base and Dr. List. Return with the scepter and bring it back to me. I will keep it secure until we determine what HYDRA’s next steps should be.”

Steve nods, stands at parade rest, and swings for the cheap seats. “I’ll need the Winter Soldier.”

A muscle in Pierce’s jaw twitches as the rest of him goes very still. “Oh? I’m not sure that’s wise, Captain. The Winter Soldier is…something of an unstable asset. Very valuable, to be sure, very effective. But—it requires some careful handling. I’m surprised you even know about it, to be honest.”

 _It_. Like Bucky’s not even a person. Like he’s just a thing, a weapon. The rage that overtakes Steve is so all-consuming that it carries him through incoherent anger to a kind of impossible, crystalline clarity, sharp enough to cut.

“I think I have more than enough experience in that kind of handling,” he says, instead of murdering Pierce with his bare hands. “And just who do you think started the Winter Soldier project? HYDRA recovered Barnes thanks to me.”

In its own way, that’s the entire, unvarnished truth. If Steve had just insisted on looking for Bucky after he fell, if he hadn’t given up on him, if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with being Captain America that he hadn’t noticed the changes in Bucky that meant he’d survived that fall…if only he’d just _caught him_ …

“Hmm. You’ll find your…friend…somewhat changed. He never submitted easily to HYDRA’s control. Which I’m wondering about, given what I know about _you_ now.”

Steve shrugs, and offers Pierce more deceptive truths. “He’s loyal to me, not to HYDRA. And he was never much of a fan of Zola, after Azzano. He’s the backup I want for this mission if I’m going up against Iron Man. Can he be ready for deployment in time?”

Pierce picks up his phone and taps at the screen. “Of course. I suppose the asset will take orders from you easily enough. Perhaps you’ll even have a touching reunion,” says Pierce with a nasty smile. “I’ll have it taken out of storage. Delta STRIKE will serve as additional backup. I’ll tell the Sokovia base to expect you by tomorrow morning their time. And Captain: if you cannot control Stark, kill him.”

“Understood, sir.”

* * *

Bucky is being kept in the underground vault of a bank in Washington DC. The bank itself is a HYDRA front, apparently, and as he follows Rumlow into the employees-only area, then into an elevator and down and down, Steve realizes all over again that he has no idea what the hell he’s doing. Oh, he has the broad outline of a plan, sure, he has objectives. But as Rumlow leads him lower and deeper, until they reach the underground HYDRA base and the vault itself, the only thoughts in Steve’s head are _Bucky Bucky Bucky_ and _what the hell am I going to do when I see him_.

He’s not ready for this. He’s not ready at all.

“Has the asset been activated yet?” asks Rumlow as a lab-coated technician hurries to begin opening the vault, his eyes wide as he takes in Steve.

Steve nods at him and says, “Hail HYDRA,” because it’s worked for him so far.

“Uh, the initiation procedure has been activated, we’ll be opening the cryostasis chamber shortly, sir.”

“Take us there,” Steve orders, and the technician just keeps gaping at him. “ _Now_ ,” snaps Steve, and the technician jumps and scurries to pull the vault open.

Four HYDRA soldiers file in as the vault opens, taking up defensive positions, their rifles pointed at the upright metal and glass coffin in the center of the room. Bucky is inside of it. The glass is slightly frosted over, and through it, Steve’s serum-enhanced vision can see every detail of Bucky’s face: his lank hair, longer than Steve has ever seen it, the hollows under his cheekbones, his too-pale skin, the pained furrow in his brow and the frown on his almost-blue lips. A hissing sound comes from the coffin-like cryostasis chamber, some sort of gas or air escaping, and Bucky’s eyes begin to move under his still-closed eyelids.

The technician and Rumlow are speaking, more HYDRA scientists rush in, but Steve doesn’t pay attention, he just steps closer to the chamber, desperate to wrench it open, to grab Bucky and run, but no, no, that’s not the mission—

“Warming procedure complete, core temperature reaching optimal levels. Open the chamber.”

The soldiers step forward as the chamber opens with another hiss and a release of frigid air, and with their weapons drawn, they manhandle Bucky to an examination table, where the scientists take over. Bucky looks dazed, and he’s shivering, though his deathly pallor is swiftly turning to something more pink and healthy looking, and his arm, his whole left arm from the shoulder on down, is a brutal and beautiful prosthetic, made out of shining, silvery metal.

Steve takes one step forward, then another. He can’t even _think_ through the static of horror and rage filling his mind, but he has to—he needs to—

“We need to be wheels up ASAP,” says Rumlow. “Will the asset be ready—”

“Of course, but this takes more than five minutes—”

Rumlow puts an arm on Steve’s shoulder, and it takes every single last bit of his self control not to attack Rumlow for it. “Cap, be careful,” he says. “You might want to wait to brief the asset, they still need to—”

Steve shakes Rumlow off and goes to Bucky.

Steve thought he’d prepared himself for this. Natasha had certainly tried to prepare him: _he won’t know you, Steve_ , she’d said, dropping all her watchful, sly regard in favor of an almost shocking earnestness. _And you can’t make plans on the assumption that he will._ Even Tony had told him: _I’ve seen some of the files, and Zola said—Steve, his brain’s a mess, they’ve been zapping away his memories for decades. Maybe his memories will come back, but it’ll take time—_ Barton had the grimmest warning of all before he left for his family’s farm, dark hollows under his eyes: _it was only a few days for me, and I’m a fucking wreck, Cap. It’s been decades for him. He’s not gonna be the guy you knew._

The memories of Steve’s own future self tell Steve the same thing: Bucky won’t remember, not really, not at first. Steve only knows a fraction of what Bucky’s been through, but he knows Bucky’s been broken down and unmade too brutally, for too long, for any easy recovery. And while Steve believes, Steve _knows_ , that Bucky has the strength to come back from that, to rebuild himself and his life and his memories, it’s not going to happen now. For all that Bucky has just emerged from a cursed, frozen sleep, this is no fairy tale, and there is no magical cure to heal him, Steve _knows_ that, he _does_.

And yet, still, the moment when Bucky looks at him, really looks at him, and there’s absolutely no recognition in his eyes nearly brings Steve to his knees. Even on that lab table in Azzano, half-delirious with nothing but name, rank, and serial number on his lips, with Steve having changed so profoundly, Bucky had known him. In that dark and dank place, heavy with the stench of death and pain, Bucky had lit up at the first sight of Steve, the way he nearly always had.

Only now, the first time Steve’s ever been deprived of that brightness, does he even realize how much his world has been built on the light in Bucky’s eyes, only now does Steve begin to understand just how very much that light has been the sun his entire world revolves around. The absence of it leaves him drifting in a dark void he doesn’t know how he’ll navigate out of.

“I’ll handle it from here,” says Steve, and his own words surprise him.

“Sir, that’s not—that’s too dangerous, the asset is unstable, especially so soon after coming out of stasis, it needs to be calibrated—”

Something that’s almost a flinch shivers across Bucky’s face, and for a bare half-second, there’s such furious despair in Bucky’s eyes that Steve’s heart feels like it’s cracking and burning and turning to ash, consumed by a fire that’s equal parts rage and love. The total blankness that swiftly replaces the despair on Bucky’s face is somehow worse still than the despair.

The serum means Steve’s brain moves faster than it once had, can process more things at once, so while the technician babbles nervously, Steve thinks a lot of things at once. He thinks: _I can’t do this_. He thinks: _I have to do this, Bucky needs me to do this._ He thinks: _I’m going to burn HYDRA to ashes_.

“There’s a _procedure_ ,” continues the lab tech, and Rumlow says, “We’ve gotta hurry this along, we’re on a tight timeline here.”

Distantly, Steve realizes: none of them know who Bucky is. Pierce knows, but the HYDRA rank and file don’t. Steve can work with that.

“I said, _I’ll handle it from here_. No calibration. Everyone, out.”

“Sir!” protests the lab tech, as the other HYDRA soldiers in the room shift uneasily.

Steve tears his eyes away from Bucky, and looks at Rumlow. “I said, _out_.”

Whatever look is on Steve’s face right now, it must be bad, because Rumlow can’t meet his eyes. Rumlow gestures the other soldiers out with a jerk of his head, then glances at Steve.

“Your funeral,” he says. “I’ll have transport ready for us in 30. If the Soldier kills you, we’re going without you.”

All the HYDRA goons file out of the room, muttering and casting anxious glances over their shoulders. Steve doesn’t give a fuck about them. He only cares about Bucky, who’s tense and shivering, his eyes fixed on Steve, still no recognition in them, only a sharp wariness. God, what can Steve even say, or do? He casts around for a blanket, a jacket, anything, because Bucky’s still shivering, but he doesn’t find one, so he just takes his own jacket off and drapes it over Bucky’s shoulders. For the space of half a dozen heartbeats, Bucky stops breathing, and the wariness in his eyes shifts to confusion and fear, like he doesn’t understand this small act of kindness. Steve’s heart aches so sharply he’s afraid it’s going to give out, that what scarlet fever hadn’t managed, or asthma, or a heart murmur, this unbearably vulnerable look on Bucky’s face will.

“Do you know who I am?” Steve asks, as gently as he can.

“Handler,” says Bucky, his voice little more than a low rasp, and Steve can’t help it, he flinches. Bucky regards this reaction with alarm, shrinking into himself and away from Steve.

Steve knows what he should do. He should say yes, he’s the Soldier’s handler for this mission, he should brief him, he should keep the cover up and sort it all out once they have the scepter back, once Bucky’s safe. Bucky’s in no shape to believe Steve about his stolen memories right now, and this isn’t the time or place to begin to recover them. But Steve has to _try_. He can’t treat Bucky like a weapon, like a _thing_. He has to make sure Bucky knows Steve won’t hurt him.

“My name is Steve Rogers. I—some people call me Captain America, but you—I’m just Steve, to you. I know—I know you’ve got no reason to believe me, but I’m your friend,” Steve says, and his voice breaks on the word. _Friend_. It’s always seemed like too small of a word for what Bucky is to him. But he has no better word, other than maybe just _yours_. _I’m yours and you’re mine._ “Do you—can you tell me your name?”

Bucky’s brow furrows. “I don’t have one,” he says, his hoarse voice worryingly vague and distant, like the lack of a name doesn’t bother him. “What’s—” He stops, clears his throat, and fuck, water, Steve should get him some water— “What’s the mission?”

“We’re retrieving an object, a potential weapon, to secure it. It’s a scepter, with a kind of jewel in it. I’ll show you a picture later, just—your name is James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky. I—everyone always called you Bucky.”

Bucky just looks at him, and still, there’s no recognition, not of Steve, and not of his own name. It’s not as devastating a sight as watching Bucky fall away from him into an icy ravine, but it’s close. Steve feels the same helpless desolation, the same sick disbelief.

“Is that the cover,” Bucky says, like he doesn’t have the energy or interest to even make it a question, his face gone blank again.

“No, Buck, it’s—it’s just the truth. I’m gonna get you out of here, okay? I’m gonna get you away from HYDRA, get you safe. You just gotta follow my lead on this mission, alright? And then we’ll both—we’ll be free, and you can do whatever you want, go wherever you want. No more cryo, no more—no more calibration.”

Bucky doesn’t accept or reject this, just tilts his head and looks at Steve. The intensity of his focus almost makes up for the lack of familiarity.

“You’re crying,” observes Bucky, and shit, he is, tears are streaming unbidden down his cheeks, and he wipes them away roughly. They don’t have time for this. Steve really does need to brief Bucky on the mission, needs to get him ready to get on the transport.

“Sorry. Sorry, I shouldn’t—I’ve just missed you, so much,” says Steve, then he sniffs, wipes away any lingering wetness from his eyes, and tries to smile. “Hey, are you warm enough now? I can—”

Something falters in Bucky’s expression, and for a split second, there’s the faintest flash of that old light in Bucky’s eyes.

“I knew you,” Bucky murmurs. Steve can’t parse the complicated and fast flickers of feeling that rush across Bucky’s face: wonder, maybe, and longing, and still so much fear and confusion.

“Yeah,” breathes Steve. “Yeah, you—”

Some HYDRA asshole comes in, and every human thing about Bucky shuts down, is locked away beyond Steve’s reach. Steve wants to double over and cry, wants to hold Bucky close and promise he’s going to be safe, he’s going to be free, soon, soon, just wait a little longer. Instead, he turns, making sure to block the officious scientist’s view of Bucky. He has a mission. If he’s going to get them out of this, if he’s going to ensure that Bucky has the chance to become that Bucky from the future, smiling and happy, he has to stick to the fucking mission.

“What,” he snaps.

“Sir, we have to check the arm, do maintenance. If we don’t, the asset’s mission readiness could be severely curtailed, and there are other pre-mission checks to complete—”

“Of course. I’ll brief the Soldier while you do,” Steve says, and hopes to god none of the technicians notice the fine tremor of furious grief running through him.

* * *

The techs finish with Bucky, and Steve wraps up his quick rundown of the upcoming mission—valuable artifact retrieval and relocation, Sokovia, potential hostiles—just as Rumlow returns and reports that there’s a chopper en route to take them to an airfield.

“Chopper’s ten minutes out,” says Rumlow, eyeing Steve and Bucky with a kind of morbid interest, like he really had expected Bucky to try to kill Steve.

Steve feels an entirely inappropriate surge of pride: that’s Bucky, still fucking with HYDRA even when they’ve done their damndest to stamp out all his resistance.

“Good,” Steve says. “The Soldier and me still need to gear up. Armory?” he asks, and Rumlow leads them to it, the rest of the STRIKE team following, their guns trained on Bucky. “Is that really necessary?”

“Our asset here isn’t exactly safe,” Rumlow says. “And he hasn’t been wiped.”

“Well he’s not gonna hurt me, and he’s not gonna hurt you either,” Steve says. Not yet, anyway. “I’ve made sure of it. And I’m not running an op where your attention’s on one of our own instead of the mission. So stand down, that’s an order.”

The STRIKE team fidgets restively, but at a begrudging nod from Rumlow, they do stand down, and Steve and Bucky can gear up in peace. All Steve has brought with him is the shield, for the sake of his double agent cover, so he puts on the same black tactical gear as the others, and tries very hard not to look at Bucky as Bucky puts his own gear on. He’s utterly silent save for the slight, barely audible whirring of his metal arm, and the occasional soft noise of weapons being holstered and strapped in place. 

“What, no Cap suit?” one of the STRIKE guys sneers.

Steve ignores him, and pulls the shield out of its case. He senses Bucky going utterly still beside him.

“That suit SHIELD gave me was no better than the outfit the USO had me in,” he says, before risking a glance at Bucky.

Bucky’s staring at the shield, unblinking and intense. Steve almost gives it to him, because what if touching it will spark some memory, what if—he puts the shield in its harness on his back instead. Bucky’s eyes follow the motion, then fix on Steve’s face. _Trust me_ , Steve pleads silently with him. _Please, please trust me, and I will get us out of this._ Bucky frowns, and while that pensive, frustrated look is familiar, Steve has no idea what could possibly be going on in Bucky’s head right now.

“Chopper’s here,” says Rumlow.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

* * *

They take the chopper to an airfield where a jet is waiting, and to Steve’s dismay, there’s no hope of privacy in the close confines of the jet. The flight to Sokovia will take at least eight hours, and while Steve doesn’t have to worry that Tony will beat them there—the plan is for Tony to arrive after them—he had hoped for more of a chance to give Bucky an idea of what to expect. He’d told Bucky to follow his lead, but there’s no guarantee Bucky will. Steve’s just going to have to keep Bucky close and hope for the best.

The first couple hours of the flight are spent going over the operation, poring over maps and contingency plans and files on Iron Man’s capabilities. Those files aren’t entirely accurate, Tony had informed Steve smugly. _Like hell SHIELD knows everything I’ve got up my sleeve_. But the files on the Sokovia base, and its leader Baron Von Strucker, are, and Steve commits them to memory. Bucky pays close attention too, and it’s both exactly like and entirely different from planning sessions with the Howlies. Bucky’s diligent focus is the same, but his total silence is disquieting, and Steve keeps pausing at odd moments, expecting some wry comment from Bucky, or an objection to his plan, and being met with nothing but silence or some unwelcome comment from Rumlow.

“Getting the scepter should be easy,” Steve says. “Keeping it might be a problem. So let’s make sure we keep our focus where it belongs. I want most of you stationed outside, on the lookout for Iron Man…”

When Steve’s done giving the STRIKE team their orders—carefully calibrated to ensure that Steve and Bucky will have the minimum HYDRA accompaniment for most of the time spent retrieving the scepter—Bucky finally speaks.

“The target—what is it?” he asks.

Steve pulls out the file on it, passes over some of the photos.

“The scepter is a magic space rock, pretty much. It’s got certain powers, something to do with the mind we think, and it can exert some influence on people all on its own. So we’ll be keeping it in containment whenever we handle it, understood?“

Bucky looks up from the photos and gives him a glare that’s somewhere between disgusted and disbelieving. It’s a look that very clearly says _are you shitting me with this, Rogers_? And it’s so Bucky that Steve has to fight down a totally inappropriate elated grin.

“Listen, I know, okay? But magic space rock is basically what it is.”

That’s pretty much Steve’s main takeaway from all the Infinity Stone talk, anyway.

“We call them 0-8-4s, Cap,” says Rumlow, looking between Steve and Bucky with some consternation.

“Yeah, the SSR had that designation back in my day too, and it just means we don’t know what the fuck it is,” Steve tells him, amused when the curse word makes Rumlow raise his eyebrows. That’s rich, he can buy Captain America being HYDRA but not having a foul mouth? What a jerk. “Magic space rock is more accurate.”

Bucky narrows his eyes, annoyed. Probably he’s thinking _there’s no such thing as magic_ or _stop fucking around, Steve_ or _how the fuck do you know it’s from space_ or _space rocks are called meteorites, Steven_.

The fact that Bucky says none of this aloud does not stop Steve from fucking with him. Steve might as well try to jog Bucky’s memories through the power of annoying him.

“Hey, New York got invaded by literal aliens who poured out of a portal in the sky a few days ago, so yeah, I’m gonna go with calling this thing a magic space rock.”

Rumlow looks alarmed, keeping a wary eye on Bucky. “Uh, I’m not sure the asset needs to know—”

Steve ignores him, shuffles through the files, pulls up the one on Loki that includes some newspaper front pages and photos of the portal roiling over Stark Tower, and shows them to Bucky. Bucky takes it all in rapidly.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he says, and it’s the most like himself he’s sounded since stepping out of that cryostasis chamber.

“I know, right? Aliens! Actual aliens!” Steve beams at Bucky until feels the disbelieving attention of the entire STRIKE team, and when he looks away from Bucky’s faintly enraged surprise, he sees them all staring in confusion. Steve clears his throat, and continues in his best Captain America voice, “So stay alert to any anomalies, Soldier.”

* * *

With the briefing and planning over with, there are still hours of time left until they arrive in Sokovia, and unfortunately, Rumlow tries to spend the time attempting to bond with Steve over their commitment to HYDRA. Steve gamely attempts to go along with it at first, reasoning that he can try to get some intel that way, but the intel value is quickly outweighed by the tediousness of the conversation.

“I was top of my class at HYDRA prep,” brags Rumlow.

HYDRA has a _prep school_ now? Steve hopes the baffled rage he’s currently feeling doesn’t show in his expression. Maybe it does, because Bucky’s staring intently at him, a thoughtful kind of frown on his face.

“Uh huh,” says Steve. “Back in my day, we got our HYDRA lessons from some guy in the YMCA basement and we were grateful for it.”

Rumlow laughs. When Steve doesn’t let his expression waver from his best attempt at recreating what his old USO propaganda movie director’s instruction of _now clench your jaw with stern and noble sacrifice_ , Rumlow’s laugh trails into awkward silence until he mutters, “Sorry, sir.”

“Get what rest you can,” Steve orders. “There might not be a chance once we’ve got the scepter.”

The STRIKE team all murmur yes sirs and settle in to catch some shut-eye, but Bucky’s upright posture doesn’t relax and he stays awake, his eyes on Steve. Maybe Steve should find it unsettling. There’s certainly no real warmth in Bucky’s attention, and that hurts, that has part of Steve certain that Bucky’s furious with him. The weight of Bucky’s focus is a comfort too though; Steve’s spent most of his life with that focus on him, and even now, when Bucky doesn’t know him, it helps Steve feel real, feel _seen_ , for the first time since waking up in this century.

And maybe Bucky doesn’t know him now, but there’s a tiny furrow on his forehead as he looks at Steve, and there’s something searching in his stare. If Steve could, he’d open up his own brain and his heart and whatever intangible thing his soul is to lay them all bare for Bucky, he’d let Bucky rummage and sift through all of Steve to find some of those memories that have been taken from him, and he wouldn’t even mind that Bucky would see the truth of how Steve loves him too much and always has.

Can he tell now, Steve wonders. He can tell _something_ , Steve’s face is telling him something, because his cold focus thaws to a warm and wanting wonder. Steve breathes in, ready to call Bucky’s name, ready to say something, anything, to remind him of who they are, and to hell with HYDRA and the STRIKE team and the mission, they’ll figure something out, improvise—

But the warmth doesn’t last, it shivers away too quickly into a kind of terror, a brief spasm of agony, and then all of it is wiped away to leave only exhausted blankness.

It hits Steve like a blow, a brutal punch to the gut, and he can’t help but rock with the pain and curl into himself. He thinks he hears Bucky breathe in sharply, but Steve can’t look, can’t bear to see that familiar and beloved face look so empty. Instead Steve holds the memory—no, the future possibility, the potential, the prayer—of the future Bucky close, that Bucky who will smile again, who will be safe and happy, and who maybe, god please, will look at Steve with that beloved light in his eyes again.


	3. Chapter 3

The HYDRA research base run by Strucker is nestled in an old fortress in the foothills near Sokovia’s battered capital city of Novi Grad. Sokovia is fresh off the chaos of a nation-wide rebellion apparently, and the mark of it is evident across much of the country when they fly over it. For a moment, it’s like the war hasn’t ended and it’s still 1945, Steve and Bucky and the Howlies on the way to some new mission in some other Nazi-occupied territory. One glance at a blank-faced Bucky and his metal arm is all it takes to dispel that brief illusion.

When they arrive at the base, it’s bustling with activity, HYDRA troops rushing around all over to set up some decidedly 21st century defenses, looking strangely out of place when set against the fortress’s obvious age: anti-aircraft guns are being put up along the fort’s ramparts, and a couple of tanks are rumbling into place at strategic locations. It doesn’t quite match Steve’s future self’s 2014 memory of the place; in 2012, the base is still new and HYDRA hasn’t yet had the chance to beef up the security so much, nor has it had the chance to begin using the alien weapons from the invasion.

Acting fast had been the right call, thinks Steve, as he goes over the defenses with the STRIKE team. With the element of surprise, and with the information Steve is currently feeding them through the active comms still hidden in his ear, Iron Man and War Machine will probably have enough firepower to decimate the base.

“We’re about forty-five minutes out, Cap,” Tony tells him over the comms, and Steve clenches his jaw rather than jump like he wants to. “Hope you have the scepter by then. We’ll stay off your channel unless you need us.”

It takes five minutes just to get into the damn fortress, and then they waste another ten minutes when Strucker immediately points a gun at Steve, which leads to Bucky moving with terrifying speed to put a gun to Strucker’s head, and things very nearly go to shit right there because Steve almost says Bucky’s name and only barely manages to correct to _Soldier_. It’s enough to keep Bucky from pulling the trigger, anyway.

“Soldier, stand down! Hail HYDRA, Strucker,” Steve says, arms up and loose at his sides. 

“ _Captain America_ is HYDRA? Bullshit,” spits Strucker, then looks at Rumlow wildly. “You believe this shit?!”

“I’m hurt,” Steve deadpans, though his heart is pounding. “And I hail HYDRA’d you and everything. Listen, I don’t care if you believe me or not, but these orders come from Pierce. Hand over the scepter before Iron Man shows up to wreak havoc and blow us all up. Your location has been compromised, and securing the scepter is critical to HYDRA’s mission.”

“Oh? And tell me, _Captain,_ what is HYDRA’s mission?” asks Strucker.

Fuck. What _is_ HYDRA’s mission? World domination, sure, general evildoing, murder, oppression, etc., but Steve’s guessing HYDRA has some neat slogan or encapsulation of their evil deeds by now and Steve does not know it.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Steve says. “We all know what HYDRA’s mission is.”

There’s an expectant silence.

“Oh no,” says Rhodes in Steve’s comms.

“What?” hisses Tony. “Do you seriously not know what HYDRA’s evil mission statement is?”

“Okay, I mean, it’s just world domination right?” says Rhodes, and goddammit, none of this is helping. “Or is there, like, some kind of special motto, or a manifesto—”

“Half an hour, Steve, just use some evil buzzwords and stall for another half an hour!”

“HYDRA’s mission is to take over the world, obviously,” says Steve, and has to fight not to wince as the words come out of his mouth. God, it sounds really dumb when you put it that way.

Bucky’s eyes slide over to him from where they’d previously been fixed on Strucker. He tilts his head just a little, his eyes narrowing fractionally. There’s still the chilly lack of familiarity there, the missing spark of brightness, but the way his lips press together tightly is very reminiscent of Bucky’s most frustrated and disbelieving _Jesus fucking Christ, Rogers_ expression, the one reserved for when Steve is fucking up so spectacularly that even Bucky’s deep well of patience is running dry. Fuck fuck fuck.

“We have an _ethos_ , Captain Rogers. This is not mere world domination, and I question your commitment to—”

“Where’s the scepter,” says Bucky, his finger tightening on the trigger, and Strucker swallows hard, but he doesn’t let it go, keeping his gun trained on Steve.

“Tell me HYDRA’s mission,” demands Strucker.

Steve looks at Rumlow, who’s waiting expectantly, though he’s visibly uncomfortable too.

“C’mon, Cap, I know you’re fresh from 19-fucking-45 and you’re still catching up, but just tell him so we can move on already. Strucker, don’t think I won’t tell Pierce exactly who held us up here.”

“I don’t give a fuck about Pierce!” shouts Strucker. “You convinced him you’re HYDRA? Well, convince me too.”

“Listen, not all of us went to HYDRA prep school, alright? We can compare notes on our theories of HYDRA’s goals later. Me, I was always taught it was about the strong ruling the weak and bringing order the only way they’ll ever understand it.”

He hopes no one brings up how _Steve_ had been one of those classified as _weak_ , before the serum.

“Nice save, Cap,” says Rhodes, relieved, but Steve just feels sick, and when he glances at Bucky, some unreadable expression flickers across his eyes, too fast for Steve to read.

“Just bring us the scepter, Strucker,” continues Steve. “Or should I call Pierce right now and tell him you want us to lose the most powerful artifact HYDRA’s recovered to Tony Stark?”

“I should still very much like to know how you go from being quite infamous for fighting HYDRA to being HYDRA,” Strucker says, finally lowering his weapon.

“It was going to be a real long con,” Steve says, and nods at Bucky. Bucky lowers his gun, though he doesn’t take his finger off the trigger. The slip in trigger discipline disquiets Steve, but he does his best to project nothing other than haughty annoyance. “Then Schmidt fucked it all up by being a nut job. So, the scepter? Or do I need to call Pierce.”

The tense silence that follows goes on just a beat too long, Strucker clenching his jaw so hard Steve can almost hear his teeth grind, before he shakes his head and smiles insincerely at Steve.

“That won’t be necessary,” says Strucker. “Follow me.”

Steve can’t risk a sigh of relief, but Tony and Rhodes can.

“Half an hour, Cap. Just get the scepter and keep up your cover for another half an hour,” Tony says.

* * *

Steve’s cover lasts for another twelve minutes.

It’s just enough time for Strucker to lead them through a series of hallways that get narrower and darker the further they go, and then down a couple of twisting staircases so tight that they have to go single file and Steve’s shield keeps banging against the wall. Finally they reach a heavily fortified door secured with some kind of device that Strucker inputs a code into, before lowering his face to it and letting it scan his eye.

“We are still working on setting up the laboratory space in the basements, so I’ve kept the scepter in secure storage for now,” says Strucker as he lets them into the long, low-ceilinged room.

It looks much like an armory, only in addition to the shelved and racked weapons, which are either 21st century weapons Steve doesn’t recognize or alien in origin, there are multiple safes and file boxes. Strucker opens one of the larger safes and removes a long metal briefcase from it.

“Here it is,” he says.

“Open it,” Steve orders. Strucker huffs but he does comply, and opens the case to reveal the scepter, the Mind Stone shining in its mount. “Alright, hand it over.”

Just as Steve’s taking the case, someone’s phone buzzes. It’s not Steve’s, and he’s about to order Rumlow to ignore it, when Rumlow says, “It’s Pierce. I’ll tell him we’ve got the scepter, Cap.”

When Rumlow answers, Steve’s super-hearing lets him pick up Pierce’s voice as easily as if Steve himself had the phone to his ear.

“Rogers is not HYDRA, I repeat, Rogers is not HYDRA. Under no circumstances must you let him leave that base with the scepter or the asset, Rumlow. I authorize you to use whatever force necessary—”

Steve locks eyes with Bucky, who’s at the rear of the room by the door. His finger is still on the trigger. Every instinct in Steve tells him to trust Bucky, to trust that he won’t put Steve in his sights, but Steve’s brain knows better. Bucky doesn’t remember him, Bucky has no particular reason to side with him now, and yet, if Bucky has the serum too, then surely he hears exactly what Steve’s hearing, and still, that gun isn’t pointing at Steve.

Steve runs through the math of the coming fight: four members of the STRIKE team, Strucker, Bucky. Steve thinks he can handle the STRIKE team and Strucker, but Bucky’s a fast enough and good enough shot that he could take Steve out before Steve can pull the shield off his back, especially at such close range. If Bucky backs him up though—

“What?” says Rumlow, slack-jawed and dumb, but still reaching for his sidearm. “But how—”

“What the fuck does that matter right now? All I know is Sitwell’s poked holes in his story big enough for a plane to fly through, and I don’t know why the hell you let one hail HYDRA from the man convince you that—forget it, is the asset there?

“Uh, yeah—”

“Put me on speaker! Soldier! Your mission has changed: eliminate Rogers and secure the scepter. Rogers is an enemy of HYDRA, do you understand?”

There’s swearing from Tony and Rhodes over the comms then, and Steve tunes it out, all his attention reserved for Bucky.

“Ha, I knew it! I told you so!” says Strucker, and then Bucky’s gun is up, the rest of the STRIKE team following, and Strucker shrieks, “Don’t you dare shoot you idiots, this room is filled with weapons and munitions! One stray bullet and we’ll all be so much pink mist!”

“I don’t miss,” says Bucky. Steve can read nothing in his tone but icy certainty, and his face has a distant kind of fury on it that settles into resolve.

“Bucky, please,” Steve says, and ignores the gun still pointed at him to focus on Bucky’s face.

“Soldier, do you understand?”

“Cap, we’re fifteen minutes out, just hang in there—”

The gun doesn’t waver. Bucky says, “I know you.”

“Soldier, eliminate the target, that’s an order—”

“Yeah, Buck, I’m your friend. I’m Steve, and you’re Bucky, and we’re—we’re friends,” says Steve helplessly.

It’s so little to offer up, when set against all of HYDRA’s brutalities. But it’s all Steve has. Steve can give a pre-battle pep talk, a rousing speech to the troops, but he can’t distill two decades of friendshipand love into words when it really matters.

Pierce is bellowing through the phone and Rumlow is shouting and Tony is telling Steve that he and Rhodes will be there soon and Strucker is yelling and Steve ignores all of it in favor of Bucky, so he sees it when Bucky’s expression falters into something almost desperate, he hears it when Bucky says, “You reached for me.”

For too-long seconds, Steve doesn’t understand. When he does, he nearly falls to his knees, the memory of the howling, icy wind and rattling train louder than the real shouting all around him.

“Yeah,” Steve says hoarsely. “Yeah, Buck, I did, and I didn’t catch you. You fell, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t ever expect you to forgive—”

“You _reached for me_ ,” Bucky says again, his voice shaking. “I _remember_ that,” he adds, then he stops, and before Steve can say anything else, Bucky’s expression clears, turning serene and focused. “Get down, Steve,” he says.

Steve gets down, and in the same motion, he drops the case holding the scepter, frees the shield from its harness, and throws it in a trajectory that hits Rumlow and the STRIKE agent closest to him, at the same instant that Bucky shoots Strucker and another STRIKE agent. It all happens at supersoldier speed, too fast for the STRIKE team to react, and Steve lets the fight take over, lets his body do what it’s meant to do.

Steve’s never been any good at dancing, but the brutal improvisational choreography of a fight comes easy to him, and it comes easier still when his partner is Bucky, Bucky who was once as good a dancer as he was a boxer, and he used to be very good at both. Now all the grace and power he’d already had have been refined and honed to supersoldier sharpness, so when Bucky catches the rebound of the shield and sends it spinning across the room to disarm half the STRIKE team, Steve doesn’t even have to think, he just catches it in time to block a couple of shots.

Distantly, Steve registers that Pierce is still screaming, his voice tinny and furious on the phone line, and that an alarm is blaring in the fortress, and then he’s blocking blows from Rumlow with one arm and trying to disarm him with the other, before he stops blocking and starts just slamming the shield against Rumlow. Despite Steve’s grip on his wrist, Rumlow’s not letting his damn sidearm go, so Steve tilts the shield at an angle and brings it up in one sharp movement to strike under Rumlow’s chin. Rumlow’s head snaps back with an audible crunch and before he even drops to the ground, Steve’s moving on to the next STRIKE guy.

Is there memory in motion? There must be, because in the fight, Bucky moves with Steve as easy as any dance, like they’ve practiced this, memorized it, the shield flying between them so fast it hums, like it’s the music for this violent pas de deux, and in short, bruising minutes, they’re the only two left standing. Bucky’s wide-eyed and breathing hard, and so is Steve, and Steve _wants_ —but no, the scepter, the mission.

“You okay?” Steve asks him, casting a quick eye over him in search of any blood or injuries, and Bucky nods.

Steve wants to ask him a hell of a lot more than just that, like what exactly he remembers and whether he really understands just what’s going on here and what he intends to do. But there’s no damn time, so Steve swallows down his questions, and turns his attention to the scepter. He fumbles the case open and looks at the scepter with a grimace. If he carries that thing along with his shield—Steve can manage, probably, but it’ll be clumsy and awkward. Steve taps at his comms.

“Stark, what’s your ETA?”

“Nine minutes, do you have the package? Can you get clear of the base? Because Rhodey and I are going to light it the fuck up, and you and the Terminator there need to not be in it when we do.”

“We have the package, yeah. And we’ll get clear,” Steve says, and hopes like hell it’s not a lie. It’ll be close, but they can do it, Steve thinks. 

He fills Bucky in as rapidly as he can, and Bucky’s already moving, grabbing weapons and reloading his gun.

Steve’s hastily explaining the Avengers when Bucky interrupts him. “We need to go now,” Bucky says, then nods at the scepter. “That thing’s too bulky to carry with your shield. Do you need the scepter or the stone?”

“The Stone, but I’m not sure I can—”

Bucky kneels and uses his metal arm to yank the Mind Stone free of its setting in the scepter. He tosses it to Steve then strides out of the room. “Let’s go.”

* * *

“Wait, we should—we need a plan, Buck!”

Steve shoves the Mind Stone in his pocket and scrambles to catch up to Bucky, who’s striding down the hallway like he’s not in danger of being shot by a stray HYDRA agent.

“We have a plan: it’s to be clear of this base in eight minutes.”

“Right, with every single HYDRA agent in this place wanting to stop us. C’mon, at least let me cover you with the shield—”

Bucky stops abruptly, his brow furrowing in confusion. “Cover me,” he says uncertainly, not quite a question.

“Yeah, Buck, me on point with the shield, and you on my six ready to shoot anyone we run into. We used to—we used to use that formation all the time.”

“I don’t—” Bucky starts, then he grimaces, rubbing at his forehead, and shakes his head. Still, he says, “Okay,” and falls back to give Steve room to take point.

They rush through the lower levels as fast as they can while still trying to maintain some semblance of stealth. If they get stuck at one of the staircases, they’ll be able to defend the bottleneck easily, but it’ll kill their chance of getting out in time. Luckily, despite the alarm blaring, their path is mostly clear, and they only need to take out a few HYDRA agents who are more surprised to see them than the other way around. It takes them six minutes to get to the fortress’s big, high-ceilinged main hall, which Steve’s feeling pretty good about until he sees at least a couple dozen HYDRA agents pour in, their guns out and trained on Steve and Bucky. They’re entirely blocking Steve and Bucky’s exit route out of the fortress.

_Well, shit._

Before Steve can even raise his shield, Bucky yanks him back, his metal arm coming around his neck and shoulders to secure him in a hold. For a few seconds, Steve feels something like the sickening shift of a nightmare, the moment where something once familiar turns strange and horrifying. He struggles against Bucky’s implacable grip, unsure of whether he’s doing it for show or in earnest.

“I’ve secured the intruder,” Bucky says in a flat voice, and Steve doesn’t know: is this part of the non-existent plan, or is Bucky really betraying him?

“Cap, what’s going on? Are you clear yet?” asks Tony, but it’s not like Steve can answer.

One of the HYDRA agents rushes forward, a lab-coated scientist right on his heels. “And the scepter, do you have the scepter?” demands the scientist.

“It’s in secure storage,” Bucky says, and Steve nearly laughs, knees going weak with relief, because it’s not even a lie and it means Bucky’s still with him.

The scientist swears. “And you didn’t bring it _with you_? I always told Zola he relied too much on those goddamn wipes, its brains are mush and it’s barely better than having a badly programmed robot—”

Bucky’s body goes furiously tense everywhere it’s pressed against Steve, one long line of rage, and Steve leans back against him, a silent reassurance. Bucky tightens his grip around Steve’s shoulders, like a weird kind of hug/grapple from behind; to Steve’s horror, the comforting almost too-heavy pressure of it makes tears spring to his eyes.

“My orders were to subdue Rogers and secure the scepter.”

It’s really not the time to be having inconvenient emotions about Bucky’s arms around him: the HYDRA agents’ guns are still trained on them, and shield or no shield, Steve doubts he can get past all of them easily, even with cover fire from Bucky. And yet, here Steve is, blinking away tears because Bucky’s holding him, kind of, for the first time in seventy years.

 _Get a grip, Rogers_.

The HYDRA agent who seems to be in charge narrows his eyes. “I heard Pierce’s orders: you were ordered to _eliminate_ Rogers.”

“Fuck,” mutters Bucky, a different kind of tension in his frame now, a coiled stillness that’s ready to act.

“Stark, if you could start blowing things up now, that would be great,” says Steve. “We need a distraction if we’re gonna have any chance of getting out of here.”

“You got it,” says Tony. “Brace yourself for incoming.”

“Soldier, eliminate Rogers, that’s an order! Eliminate Rogers or we’ll shoot!”

The scientist waves his hands wildly. “Are you insane? You’ll destroy the asset!”

“What’s the plan, Buck?” Steve whispers.

“Take cover, then run,” says Bucky. “That’s the plan.”

And then there’s a sound like fireworks and bombs and Bucky’s pushing him down and forward, and in his peripheral vision Steve sees something small and beeping flying from Bucky’s hand. He has just enough time to wonder _flash bang or grenade_? as he brings up the shield to cover them. He learns the answer when everything explodes around them.

Once his ears stop ringing and his vision comes back, Steve shouts, “This is a shitty plan,” but Bucky’s already shoving him forward as he shoots into the smoke, so Steve runs.

It’s hard to see in the smoke and chaos; Steve’s swinging the shield around on pure instinct, only occasionally making impact as he runs forward towards what he really hopes is the exit. Despite the haze of smoke and the increasing chaos of Tony and Rhodes’ bombardment, Bucky is still shooting behind Steve, and Steve hears the occasional ping of bullets against his shield and presumably Bucky’s metal arm. Not all of the bullets bounce harmlessly off the shield; a couple of them sear burning lines of pain across Steve’s right biceps and left hip when they graze him. But judging by the occasional scream, Bucky’s bullets are finding their targets, so Steve runs on even as he’s mostly blinded by the smoke and debris.

As if all the bullets aren’t enough to deal with, an ominous rumble starts up, and Steve narrowly dodges a chunk of falling masonry that would’ve caved even his super soldier skull in.

“Cap, the roof’s coming down, are you clear yet?” asks Tony urgently.

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Steve grits out. “Not clear yet, no, there are too many hostiles, and the—” Bucky grabs his shoulder and yanks him out of the way of another piece of falling stone. “Jesus, this place is falling down around our ears!”

“Yeah, well, it’s like a thousand years old and apparently medieval architecture isn’t built to withstand Iron Man, who knew,” says Tony, sounding distracted now. “Rhodey, you seeing this?”

“Shit, HYDRA’s sending in the big guns,” says Rhodes. “How the _hell_ do they have access to ICBMs and drones?”

“Cap, we gotta do some evasive maneuvers to shake these things without getting blown up, just—just hang in there, we’ve got more backup on the way and we are gonna come back for you!”

 _Fuck_. Steve has to be nearly to the exit by now, and Bucky’s right behind him, but that’s not gonna count for much if they come out of the fortress and straight into another group of HYDRA agents. The sound of rumbling intensifies, only now it’s followed by a series of ominous groaning and cracking noises.

“Watch out!” shouts Bucky.

On instinct, Steve brings up the shield to cover his head and neck, and in seconds, everything gets dark and dusty and crushing. He must black out for at least a minute or so, because the next thing he knows, he’s blinded by dust, coughing, pinned under an enormous piece of masonry from his hips on down. The adrenaline pounding through his body means he mostly only registers the pressure and the weight of the stone. Steve can feel the pain coming though, and he almost welcomes it—he’s pretty sure not feeling any pain at all in this kind of situation is a really bad sign.

At least he can free himself from the hips up. There’s heavy debris over his shield where he used it to protect his head and neck, but once he gathers some strength, he can shove his shield arm forward and push most of it off.

“Rogers! Steve!” It’s Bucky’s voice, sharp and almost frantic.

“Here!” Steve calls out, and waves the shield as high as he can. It isn’t very high; he’s in a half-seated position, propped up against what he’s pretty sure is a body or two, an enormous piece of the fortress roof pinning his legs. “You okay, Buck?”

“I’m clear of the cave-in, hang on, I’m almost to you,” he says, which both is and isn’t an answer. Steve tries to get a hold of Stark and Rhodes next.

“Stark, come in, do you read me? Rhodes? Does anyone read me?” he manages to rasp, and gets no answer. When he brings a hand to his ear, he finds that the tiny earpiece communicator is gone. _Great_.

Still, at least Bucky’s clear, Steve thinks as Bucky runs through the debris to reach him, the shine of his metal arm catching the light that’s now streaming in through the collapsed portion of the fortress roof. He looks somewhat bruised and battered, a few scrapes on his face, but he’s okay, and that makes him the next best thing to a guardian angel. Steve sighs in relief. Things may be FUBAR, but at least Bucky’s alright, at least he’ll be able to get out of this, get free of HYDRA.

When Bucky reaches Steve, he immediately tries to shift the masonry off of Steve’s lower half. Even with the metal arm and super strength, he can’t manage it.

“Can you push up while I pull?” asks Bucky, and they try that for a minute or so before the pain makes its debut, and Steve has to stop, gasping, his face going clammy with a shock-y kind of flop sweat.

Bucky frowns and tries a few other ways to get the masonry off of Steve, but Steve’s pretty sure nothing short of some heavy machinery is going to shift this block off of him. It’s not as concerning a thought as it should be, until he remembers the Mind Stone. If Steve can’t get out of here in time, that’s okay, but HYDRA _can’t_ get the Mind Stone again.

“Stop,” Steve gasps. “It’s no good, we can’t shift it ourselves. Just—hang on.”

Steve wriggles and shifts around as much as he can, and the movement sends jolts of agony from his hips on down to his legs. If the masonry pinning him could just be lifted a few inches, he think he could pull himself mostly free. Stark and Bucky together should be able to manage. But Stark’s not here, and Steve can’t risk Bucky being recaptured or the Mind Stone being taken. Steve manages to shove his hand in his pocket, though it’s a real tight squeeze, and pulls the Mind Stone out. He tosses it to Bucky, who’s surprised enough that he actually fumbles it for a moment before his fist closes around the Stone.

“Buck, take it, you gotta get out, get the Stone to the Avengers—”

“No,” says Bucky, and Steve grimaces.

Under any other circumstance, Steve would probably find it a good sign that Bucky’s recovering his natural stubbornness, the immovable rock to Steve’s own unstoppable force. Right now, it’s not just inconvenient, it’s dangerous.

“The fate of the universe literally depends on it,” Steve says, and puts some Captain America authority into the words. “You have to go, you have to make sure the Stone’s safe.”

Bucky shakes his head, a confused kind of fury darkening his face. “I can’t leave you.”

“You _have_ to, Buck. _Please_ —”

Bucky narrows his eyes. “Not without you. I don’t—I don’t even know _why_ , it’s not an order or a mission, but I know I _can’t leave you_ ,” he says, his voice shaking with furious agony, and if Steve weren’t pinned under at least a ton of medieval masonry right now, he’d be walking on air on the strength of his buoyant hope.

“That’s sweet. Useless, but sweet,” says a voice, and Bucky whirls, reaching for a gun he no longer has while Steve cranes his head to try to see who’s speaking. “You’re long overdue for a wipe, Soldier. And Cap, nice try, still don’t know how you figured out we were HYDRA, but your stint as an incompetent double agent is over.”

It’s Sitwell. He’s bruised and bloody, his habitual sharp suit in dusty disarray, and in contrast to his calm voice, he’s looking wild-eyed and furious. He has a gun trained on Bucky.

“Yeah, I figured,” Steve says, and starts trying to wriggle free again.

He still has the shield, maybe if he throws it—the angle’s terrible and Steve doesn’t have nearly enough room for a proper swing or throw, but he only needs to distract Sitwell for long enough that Bucky can disarm him, and if he could just lift the rock on top of him maybe an inch, then he could try inching himself out—

“Hand over that Stone, Soldier. I know your brains are all fried and you’re confused, but that man is not HYDRA, and he is not your handler or your CO. I am. So hand it over, or I put you out of commission for good, no more freezer.”

Bucky’s only response is, “ _No_.”

Steve doesn’t wait for Bucky to finish saying the word, and he doesn’t wait to see what Sitwell does either: he doubts he has enough leverage or the right angle to throw the shield at Sitwell, but Bucky’s much closer. He heaves the shield up with an inelegant motion that strains some probably important muscle in his neck judging by the sharp spasm of pain, and throws the shield to Bucky. It’s definitely Steve’s most ungraceful shield toss ever; instead of the usual smooth discus-like motion, it flips end over end towards Bucky, who nevertheless spins to catch it with his left arm, and with one graceful motion that might be too fast for the unenhanced eye to see, blocks Sitwell’s barrage of bullets.

The bullets all ping off of the shield until Sitwell runs out of ammo, but by then a few more HYDRA agents have stumbled out of the wreckage surrounding them to point their weapons at Bucky.

“You know what, fine!” shouts Sitwell. “Let’s try out this little trick I picked up from our Russian friends then!”

 _Christ, now what_ , thinks Steve, as Sitwell begins to say something in Russian. Steve has no idea what he’s saying, none of the words match up with the pitifully small Russian vocabulary that Steve had cobbled together during the war. It’s Bucky’s reaction to the words that makes Steve realize what’s happening, one of his future self’s memories slotting into place as he sees Bucky go tense, terror in the line of his shoulders. These are the trigger words, the activation sequence for the Winter Soldier that subsumes whatever remains of Bucky into a terribly effective automaton.

“No,” says Bucky. “Don’t—”

But Sitwell keeps going, and Steve starts shouting, in the vain hope of drowning the words out—he tells Bucky to throw the shield at Sitwell, to fight whatever the words are doing—but it’s no good: Steve can see the tremor running through Bucky, the only sign visible to Steve of whatever battle is going on in Bucky’s head. Just as Sitwell is about to say what Steve thinks is the last word, the Mind Stone still clenched in Bucky’s right hand begins to glow so brightly its light is visible through Bucky’s closed fingers.

Sitwell says the last Russian word, then he says, “Soldier, I order you to kill Captain America and return the Stone in your hand to me.”

Steve’s too-fast mind throws up a succession of useless thoughts in the seconds of silence that follow: _where the hell are Stark and Rhodes_ and _Bucky will never forgive himself if he kills me when he’s not in his right mind_ and _I hope this doesn’t lead to half of the universe being killed_ and _I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t save you_ and _I love you, nothing that’s about to happen will ever change that._

Except—nothing happens at all, nothing violent, anyway. Bucky doesn’t raise the shield, he doesn’t turn towards Steve. He just stands there, the glowing Mind Stone held tightly in his hand. Steve hears him take one deep, shuddering breath, sees him sway on his feet. The Stone is still glowing, brighter now, as if Bucky is holding a small sun in his hand. A terrible, choked down sound of agony escapes Bucky’s throat, and just that sound is nearly enough to give Steve the strength to get this damn piece of fortress off of him, because he has to help Bucky, he has to stop whatever is making him sound so damn hurt, what if the Stone is _killing him_ —

“Soldier!” snaps Sitwell, equal parts fury and fear. “Are you ready to comply?”

Steve knows the answer before Bucky says it, he sees it written in every beautiful, impossibly strong line of him. It’s a familiar posture, Steve had seen it all the time right before Bucky won his boxing matches and just before he’d thrown the last punch of the fights Steve had started: Bucky’s shoulders are simultaneously relaxed and strong, his stance centered, his head tilted at a minute, barely perceptible cocky angle that says he knows he’s about to _win_.

“ _No_ ,” says Bucky, one last time, implacable and furious and triumphant. “And my _name_ is _Bucky_.”

He lets the shield fly loose from his hand, and it flies in one smooth, true arc, hitting Sitwell right in the throat, and then Bucky’s already moving to catch it on the rebound and send it flying again. Steve can’t keep holding his neck up to see after that, but judging by the sound of thuds and the ringing of metal against metal and all the groans and shouts, Bucky makes quick work of the remaining HYDRA agents.

Steve must pass out for a few seconds at least—something in the general region of his lower back is really starting to hurt, and his chest feels heavy—because the next thing he knows, Bucky’s kneeling above him, looking about as stricken and upset as Steve’s ever seen him. But he also looks like _Bucky_ , there’s the light of recognition in his eyes again, even if they are bright with tears.

“Steve,” he says, and just the sound of his name in Bucky’s mouth, weighted with years of friendship and affection and sheer _knowing_ is almost enough to make Steve sob in relief.

“You remember,” says Steve, and Bucky nods, then doubles over, a hand clutching at his head, as if he’s in agony. “Buck? Are you alright? Are you hurt? What just happened—did you use the Stone?”

Bucky laughs, or no, it’s more of a sob. “I just—I wanted to be free, I wanted to remember, and now I remember too much. All of it. I—I can’t—” He covers his mouth with his hand and clenches his eyes closed tightly, seeming to suppress some terrible sound of pain, before he gets control of himself again with one shaky, deep inhale. “Any chance I can use this thing to get that damned rock off of you?”

“I dunno,” Steve tells him. His vision’s going dark at the edges, his own voice sounding far away. “Back up’s coming, don’t shoot ‘em…two guys in metal space suit looking things…”

“Steve, stay with me,” says Bucky sharply. “Keep your eyes open, c’mon.”

But the darkness keeps creeping in, something in his lower back is throbbing with hot pain, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t keep his eyes open.

* * *

The next time Steve is something close to conscious, his body feels like it’s floating and warm and very far away from him, somehow. Is this what death is like, he wonders.

“You’re not dead, Steve,” says a much beloved voice, the soft and low tones immediately reassuring him that everything’s okay.

“Bucky?” he mumbles, turning towards the sound of his voice. He can’t quite manage to do more than squint his eyes open, but he swears he feels warmer when he does, like Bucky’s presence is Steve’s own personal, golden sun. His arm is certainly shiny enough for it, gleaming even under the hospital room’s dim lighting.

“Shhh, you’re alright, we’re safe. Tony Stark’s got the weird glowing rock, HYDRA’s being handled. You ruptured a kidney and cracked some vertebrae, and you broke your hip. It’s all healing up fine though, you’re gonna be okay. Just sleep off the rest of the anesthetic, alright?”

“Don’t let Tony build a murderbot with the Stone,” Steve says, as urgently as he can.

“A what? Steve, what are you—”

But Steve floats away into the warm, sunlit sky of his anesthetic haze before he can even try to answer Bucky.

* * *

When Steve comes back down to something approaching earth, no longer feeling quite so floaty and warm, pain is the anchor weighing him down into his body’s reality. It’s a healing kind of pain though, the dull ache and itching of bones and flesh knitting back together, and Bucky’s voice, reading something in his uniquely soothing, languid cadence, makes the pain more than bearable. Now Steve can even open his eyes and keep them open too, so he can look at Bucky, and that’s worth any amount of pain.

It’s not exactly like the future memory from his future self: Bucky still has his prosthetic left arm for one thing, and he’s pale and exhausted, his hair hanging lank around his face and his unshaven stubble approaching beard status. But he’s _Bucky_ , and this is Steve’s future self’s promise fulfilled, mostly: Bucky’s eyes are no longer so full of hollow despair, and when he looks up from his book at Steve, the familiar changeable skies blue of his eyes is bright and clear and sunlit. Steve’s own personal universe clicks quietly back into place, the orbit of his life no longer wild and spinning free of gravity into the dark unknown, but tethered safe by much-missed light, and Steve blinks back tears of relief.

Bucky must take them for tears of pain, because he smoothes Steve’s hair back, his touch impossibly gentle.

“Hey, how are you feeling? Here, don’t talk yet, let me get you an ice chip. Don’t you dare try to get out of that bed either, your bones haven’t finished healing yet.”

“Wasn’t gonna,” lies Steve, before he nearly coughs the damn ice chip right back out, which makes every damn thing hurt. Bucky raises his eyebrows, clearly unconvinced. The melting ice is a cool balm to Steve’s raw and dry throat, and once he finishes it, he can talk without too much pain. “Buck, are you okay? What happened, where are we?”

“Stark Tower,” says Bucky, and when he sees Steve’s surprise, he adds, “Yeah, you’ve been out for three days. Soon as you were out of surgery and stable, Stark insisted on bringing you here, for security.”

“Okay, and you?”

Bucky’s jaw clenches, a telltale sign that he’s upset despite how even his expression is.

“I remember everything,” he says, toneless in a way that has Steve’s stomach sinking.

It’s too like the blankness of the Winter Soldier, and it’s a reminder that memories or no memories, Bucky’s not the man Steve had lost in 1945. 

“That’s…good?” tries Steve.

Bucky closes his eyes and tips his head back, inhaling sharply. “Good to remember I have a name and I had a life, like a real person, sure. But the rest—” Bucky opens his eyes again and lets his head fall forward, his long hair curtaining his face and hiding his expression. “It’s nearly 70 years of murder and torture. It’s—a lot. Too much.”

A limited selection of ten years of his future self’s life had nearly overwhelmed Steve; he can’t imagine the density and weight of Bucky’s entire life being dumped back into his brain. That he’s not rocking back and forth in a dark corner somewhere is nothing short of a miracle.

“It wasn’t you, Buck.”

“I know,” Bucky says softly, then he tucks his hair back and looks right at Steve, terribly steady despite the hollow resignation in his eyes, the sunlit light of them gone stormy. “But I did it.”

No amount of future knowledge will help Steve fix this. This is Bucky’s to bear, and Steve’s future self hadn’t told him anything to help with it, other than that Bucky is strong enough to carry the burden. Steve only wants to do whatever he can to lighten it, to take some of the load with him, if Bucky will let him.

“What do you need, Buck?” Steve asks, and reaches a hand out to him.

Bucky smiles at him through sudden tears, and takes his hand. “You know, this is the first thing I remembered, every time,” he says, his voice thick. “They took it away again, always, but still—I remembered the train—”

“You remembered falling,” Steve whispers, horrified. “You remembered me not catching you. Every time? God, Buck, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t—”

Bucky shakes his head, and his grip on Steve’s hand is tight. He presses a searing kiss to the back of Steve’s hand, then he holds it in both of his hands, cool metal and warm skin. The intimacy of the gesture goes all the way through Steve, right down to his bones, as if Bucky’s touch is ringing through him like a bell, setting off a new kind of harmony between the vibration of his bones and the thrumming of his heart strings and the singing bittersweet joy in his head.

“No, you idiot,” Bucky says. “I remembered you reaching for me.”

Steve’s not sure he sees the distinction, and he tells Bucky so. Bucky smiles at him, and even through tears, it’s enough to melt away what ice has still lingered in Steve after the Valkyrie. Some of the lines around Bucky’s eyes are new, and Steve loves them already, loves the way they etch joy and love so forcefully onto Bucky’s face.

“That’s alright,” says Bucky, unbearably tender. “But you gotta know, Steve: I remembered that moment more times than I can count, and not once did I blame you for not catching me. I was never really scared, or mad about it. It was just—it was always the one memory that convinced me I’d been a person, once.”

“Bucky—”

“I’m still not—memories or not, I’m still not there yet, Steve. I’m not—I can’t—” He stops, swallows hard, carefully loosening his almost too-tight grip on Steve’s hand. “I can’t stay, alright? I’m gonna need time. To make things right, to get right.”

“You don’t have to do it alone though. Bucky, please—”

Bucky shakes his head. “Won’t be totally alone. Me and the Stark kid, we’ve come to an arrangement. Says we’ll be square on the whole me murdering his parents front if I help him take out HYDRA. Figure I might as well take him up on that while I—while I deal with all this shit. I’ll come back, Steve, I promise. I just—I need some time.”

Steve wants to argue this plan down, wants to protest every part of it, is even ready to just plain beg Bucky to stay. His old pride about that kind of thing died in the Italian Alps, shattering into regret that he’d ever held onto it all when holding onto Bucky is what really matters. But then he remembers what his future self had told him: _he will always, always come back to you_. He needs to trust Bucky, he needs to give Bucky what he’s asking for.

So he blinks away the tears—unsuccessfully, Bucky ends up wiping them away while Steve still clutches at his hand—and says, “Okay. Alright, Buck. Anything you need. Are you—are you leaving now?”

“No, not right now,” he says, his voice gone soft and rough.

Sleep is beginning to drag Steve down again, his body’s price for the rapid healing that’s making his bones itch and ache. He doesn’t want to sleep, not if Bucky’s going to be gone when he wakes up, but his body’s probably going to make the decision for him.

“Can you keep reading to me?”

“Yeah, Steve.”

Steve doesn’t give a damn about what Bucky’s reading—some kind of murder mystery, he thinks—he just lets the easy rhythm of Bucky’s voice carry him, hoards the warmth of it against his coming absence. Bucky will come back. He’s promised. And Bucky always, always keeps his promises.

* * *

By the time Steve’s out of Stark Tower’s infirmary/makeshift hospital—released with a cane and firm instructions to take it easy for another two or three weeks until the doctors are absolutely sure his injuries have finished healing well—he’s missed nearly all of the excitement of revealing and burning out HYDRA. There’s still plenty of work to do, of course, but the most dramatic battles and revelations are over and all that’s left now is the slow grinding war of attrition that will be burning off what’s left of HYDRA’s heads.

When Steve debriefs with the rest of the Avengers and Fury in Tony’s lab, minus Barton who’s still on leave and Thor who’s still somewhere in outer space, everyone has the sleepless and faintly harrowed look of a team coming off of a brutal mission, albeit with a healthy dose of wild triumph (Tony and Natasha) and grim resolve (Fury and Rhodes). Banner just looks like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

“You’re making a real habit of sleeping through all the exciting parts, Cap,” says Tony. “You missed out on so much! Me and Rhodey rescuing you, me and your bestie bonding over our quest for vengeance, our two favorite spy assassins here going full scorched earth on HYDRA…”

“The parts I was awake for were plenty exciting enough, thanks,” Steve says wryly. “I’m gonna need more detail about going full scorched earth on HYDRA though. Did you get Pierce?”

“We got Pierce,” says Fury.

“When he was about ten seconds away from pushing the big red button and sending nukes everywhere,” adds Natasha. “He went full evil villain, with a whole speech and everything, it was kind of impressive. Even tried to sway Fury and me over to his side.”

“ _What_?” says Steve.

“It didn’t work, obviously,” says Fury with a glower that’s no less effective for being delivered with only one eye.

“Obviously, I meant, what’s this about nuclear weapons?”

“Oh, yeah, right,” says Natasha, her tone still somewhat worryingly blasé. “So, we dumped all the SHIELD files, and did a synchronized ambush-slash-purge of HYDRA agents in basically every major agency, and that worked out pretty well, element of surprise and all. Fewer casualties than expected, even, apart from HYDRA agents biting down on their cyanide capsules.”

“Alright, that’s…good, I guess,” says Steve.

“But Pierce had enough warning of what was coming to get himself to the White House,” Fury says, and shakes his head in disgust. “Motherfucker went straight for the suitcase with the nuclear codes.”

Natasha waves a breezy hand and continues, “Then it was all blah blah, he will fulfill HYDRA’s mission—”

“What even _is_ HYDRA’s mission, by the way?” asks Rhodes. “Because Cap here almost got made when he said it was world domination, and I _really_ thought it was world domination—”

“And he was about to push the button, so I shot him,” concludes Natasha.

“Good,” says Steve, and Tony gasps in exaggerated outrage while Rhodes and Banner blink in surprise. “What? I’m not above wanting some revenge, and the shit that asshole said about Bucky, the things Pierce _did_ to him…I’m glad you cut that particular head of HYDRA off.”

“Wow, language, Cap!” gasps Tony, a theatrically scandalized hand on his chest.

“Yeah, yeah, fuck off,” he says, playing up the Brooklyn in his voice, to Natasha’s obvious delight.

“I’d have preferred it if we’d taken Pierce in alive for the intel,” Fury says, and Natasha snorts.

“He was too dangerous to leave alive. The Secretary of the World Security Council being HYDRA?” Natasha shakes her head. “Even in custody, he could’ve done too much damage.”

“Who needs Pierce’s intel anyway? The stuff I got from the Zola ghost in the machine is more than enough to move on, and now we’ve got Barnes too,” says Tony. He glances over at Steve nervously. “Uh, he did talk to you, right? Because he’s all unbrainwashed and ready for revenge, but I think he needs some space—?”

“He talked to me,” says Steve, and before anyone can ask him any awkward questions about Bucky, he barrels on ahead. “Alright, so we’re handling HYDRA, what about the Infinity Stones and preventing half of the universe from being killed?”

“Oh, right, that’s still happening,” says Banner as he cleans his glasses fretfully. “Because the secret Nazis aren’t enough to deal with, oh no, we’ve got _genocidal aliens_ too.”

Tony pats Banner on the back with murmured instructions to _breathe, buddy, just find your happy place._

“We’re still waiting on Thor and Danvers,” says Fury. “I’ve updated Danvers on the situation, but until we hear from her or Thor, we’ve got to keep the Mind Stone secure, which means continuing our assault on HYDRA…”

As the briefing goes on, the universe-saving task that had seemed so overwhelming and impossible just days ago now seems downright doable. Bucky’s alive and he’s going to come back to Steve, and HYDRA’s heads are being burned off one by one. Steve has a team he can trust, and they know where all the Infinity Stones are, more or less. Okay, so they don’t know where Loki is, but so long as they find Thanos before he finds all of the Stones, surely they can defeat him, especially with the advantage of future Steve’s memories. Plus, they have Thor and Danvers on their side. Steve feels the first real, if tentative, stirrings of confidence, of hope.

They have years to go until Thanos’ last invasion. Plenty of time to finish HYDRA once and for all, and plenty of time to bring together the right team to secure the Stones and formulate a battle plan against Thanos. They can avoid and prevent the losses Steve’s future self—his alternate future self by now, Steve hopes—had warned of.

Steve indulges in a brief, hazy daydream of one last battle with Bucky at his side: one more fight and one final victory, followed by a golden, warm stretch of freedom. If there’s one lesson Steve has learned from his future self, it’s that he should reach for the freedom of that peace until it’s in his grasp, and then he shouldn’t let it go for anything. He shouldn’t let go of Bucky for anything. Everything always seems to go to shit when he does.

* * *

Five days later, when the Avengers are in the middle of planning a raid on a HYDRA base—the same compound that holds the HYDRA prep school, apparently—thunder begins to rattle the floor to ceiling windows of Stark Tower.

Banner squints out of the conference room’s windows. “Wasn’t it supposed to be clear all day today?”

“Yeah, it was, so I’m guessing that’s our very own god of thunder,” says Tony.

The team rushes to the Stark Tower landing pad, just in time to see Thor land with a swing of his hammer and a clap of thunder, along with a blaze of blue-gold light that resolves into a woman who Steve recognizes from his future memories as Carol Danvers.

“Friends, Avengers! Captain Marvel and I return to you victorious!” booms Thor, beaming like sunshine breaking through storm clouds, his words punctuated by another roll of triumphant thunder.

Thor tosses something heavy onto the landing pad, as Danvers gives Fury a jaunty salute. “Hey Nick. Got your page!”

“Is that a _head_?!” shrieks Tony.

Steve looks closer at it. It’s definitely a head. A very large, very purple, very ugly, and familiar head, its last expression caught in a hideous rictus of furious surprise.

“Is that _Thanos_ ’ head?” asks Steve, incredulous.

Thor grins brightly at them all. His red cape flutters in the breeze, the sunshine glinting on his golden hair.

“Indeed it is!” says Thor.

“Uh, but—I thought you were going to get the Tesseract back from Loki and go to Asgard,” says Natasha, looking between Thor and the head.

“I did begin to search for Loki and the Tesseract, yes, but given our foreknowledge and forewarnings, there seemed to me to be little point in pursuing the one Infinity Stone whose location we were not certain of while simply waiting for Thanos to perpetrate more death and destruction. We had but a brief window to strike before Thanos could find Loki or acquire any of the Stones, did we not? And I could not risk Thanos killing so many of Asgard’s people as Steven’s vision foretold.”

“Also, Thanos been genociding, like, a lot,” adds Danvers. “He’s been on the Nova Corps’ Most Wanted list for a while now, but the whole thing with the Kree has been keeping them busy. Figured we might as well take him out while he’s down a chunk of his army, thanks to you guys stopping his invasion here.”

“Indeed! I reached much the same conclusion after I returned to Asgard to take counsel with Heimdall the All-Seeing. First I asked Heimdall to locate Loki and the Tesseract, but he said they were beyond his sight, likely due to Loki’s magics, or his use of the Tesseract. So I asked Heimdall to locate Thanos instead, and Heimdall was able to do so! Then I undertook a _stealth_ mission to defeat him!”

Thor grins brightly at all of them, as if inviting them to be very impressed by him. Steve is pretty impressed, to be honest.

“Stealth,” repeats Rhodes faintly.

Danvers winces and shakes her head minutely, as if to say, _yeah, no, not really_. Out loud though, she says, “Yeah, I ran into Thor here when he was en route to Thanos. He told me about the whole…time travel thing? Anyway, it fit with the page I got from Nick, and I was planning to pay Thanos a visit anyway, so….”

“Captain Marvel is truly a mighty warrior! Together, and with the aid of Sif and the Warriors Three, we made quick work of Thanos’ base. Then to prevent Steve’s dire visions from coming to pass, and to save Asgard and half of the universe, we slew the Mad Titan Thanos!” says Thor, swinging his hammer as if to demonstrate.

Everyone stares at the head in silence for a long, long moment. The only sound is Thor’s cape flapping in the breeze.

“Cap?” says Fury in an almost conversational tone. “That’s really Thanos’s head?”

“Yup.”

“So…that’s it? The genocide of half of the universe has been successfully averted?” asks Rhodes. “And we didn’t even need the fancy space rocks to do it?”

“Seems so,” says Steve.

“Right. Good job, team,” Tony says, sounding like he’s kind of in shock.

They’re all still staring at Thanos’s head when Thor makes them all jump as he roars, “This calls for a _celebration_!! Stark, fetch the finest of meats and meads, for tonight, we PARTY!”

* * *

_Five months later:_

No one would call Steve a patient man, but he thinks he’s handling waiting for Bucky to come back pretty well. The memories of his future self certainly suggest that he could be handling it a hell of a lot worse; that version of Steve had let Captain America and the search for a Bucky who really wasn’t ready to be found consume him. Steve’s not doing that. Sure, he’s thrown himself into taking out what’s left of HYDRA, but he’s doing it with the team, and it’s not _all_ he’s doing. He’s moved to Washington DC to be closer to Peggy, for one thing.

The knowledge that she doesn’t have all that much time left is bittersweet; bitter for Steve, sure, but more sweet for her. She won’t linger on in confusion and pain, she’ll pass peacefully and quietly, after a live well-lived, and Steve can treasure every moment he has left with her, even when she doesn’t quite remember who he is or how he’s in the 21st century. Though her good days start to come fewer and farther in between, Steve wouldn’t give up this time with her for anything. She’s still his steady true north, always ready and willing to keep him from straying off his course towards his dream of freedom and peace.

_I worried sometimes that Captain America would become a cage for you, or worse still, that it would swallow you whole. Promise me you won’t let that happen, darling. The world needs Steve Rogers more than it needs Captain America._

Steve thinks it took his future self a long time to really understand that. He doesn’t intend to make the same mistake.

Moving to Washington DC means Steve has had the chance to befriend Sam Wilson in this timeline too, and while Steve had some moments of feeling like a genuine lunatic as he attempted to devise a running route that would make his path cross with Sam’s—it had worked for future Steve hadn’t it?—Steve has no regrets. Though Natasha thinks he maybe he _should_ have some.

 _So, instead of just, I don’t know, visiting the VA where he runs support groups and getting to know him there, you decided to do some light stalking?_ Natasha had asked.

_Listen, it worked in another timeline, alright? And in this timeline, I’m not gonna immediately get him in life-threatening danger, so I think this friendship is going pretty great, actually._

_Wow, you’re kind of a disaster, huh? No, don’t make that face, I love disasters._

Plus, Steve actually _is_ going to the VA meetings too. He’d expected to feel out of place and awkward at them, and he had, the first few weeks. But when he’d started talking at them, he’d been surprised to find that it helped, and that he seemed to be helping other people too, just by sharing his own doubts and fears.

 _It means a lot to these guys to see that Cap’s not so different from them,_ Sam had told him. _And you know, you’re not half bad at this whole support group thing. You gunning for my job, Steve?_

 _Maybe we’ll swap: I’ll take the support groups, and you take the shield_ , Steve had said, and for all that Sam had laughed it off as a joke, the words feel right, feel true. Someday, Steve’s pretty sure that Sam will do the shield proud.

Steve misses Bucky, sure, he misses him every single day. But Bucky checks in at least every two weeks, in admittedly unpredictable ways: sometimes with a postcard scrawled with some funny, weird observation about the 21st century; sometimes with terse texts from mysterious, blocked numbers; and sometimes even with art supplies or books Steve hadn’t ordered being shipped to his apartment. Steve takes the hint and uses the pencils and paints and pastels, begins filling the spare room he’s designated as _Bucky’s room_ with sketches and paintings and books.

It’s just—he still _really misses_ Bucky. And he can’t help but stew over how he hadn’t managed to tell Bucky practically any of the things he’d wanted to tell him. He’s gone over and over the way Bucky had pressed a kiss to his hand, the gesture far more tender and intimate than their old rough affections. He thinks too of Bucky’s words: _you reached for me_ , of how Bucky had turned Steve’s worst failure into an impossible solace.

Steve wishes he’d asked his future self more, wishes those future memories—no more than possibilities now, or alternate realities Steve will never reach—were more telling. That his future, alternate self loved Bucky was obvious. Steve’s pretty sure there’s no universe where Steve Rogers doesn’t love Bucky Barnes. Whether those versions of Steve and Bucky had something more than just friendship though remains a mystery. 

When the possibilities and doubts overwhelm him, when Steve misses Bucky too much and Bucky’s biweekly messages prove especially poor substitutes for Bucky himself, Steve goes to the Smithsonian. There’s an exhibit on Captain America and the Howling Commandos, which when Steve had first learned about it, had been equal parts mortifying and depressing. Steve’s glad the Howlies have gotten the recognition they deserve, but it’s sure as hell not how Steve had once dreamed of being featured in a museum: instead of his art, his old 4F records and the contents of his and Bucky’s apartment are on display.

Steve doesn’t come to the exhibit for any of that though. The detritus of his life and old war memorabilia aren’t what he cares about in here. Some days he comes to spend time with the Howlies the only way he can anymore. Mostly, he comes here for Bucky.

Not the heroic mural of him, or the whole section of the exhibit devoted to him, much as Bucky deserves those things. No, Steve comes for the video that’s on loop on a screen that’s tucked away in one corner of Bucky’s section of the exhibit. There’s even a bench right across from it, like the curators knew this video would be worth long appreciation.

Steve barely remembers when the footage had been filmed, thinks maybe he hadn’t even known the camera was rolling. He’s profoundly grateful for it now though, because this short loop of video has preserved him and Bucky standing together in a moment of happiness, and more important still, it’s preserved Bucky’s smile, and his laugh, in sharp black and white.

Steve’s memory is eidetic, and still, it’s no substitute for the real thing. Right now, these few seconds of footage are as close as Steve can get to the real thing, until Bucky comes back.

“Rogers, are you kidding me with this?”

He startles; he could swear he hadn’t heard anyone approach, and yet, now there’s someone sitting right next to him on the bench, and that someone is—

“Bucky?”

Steve turns and stares. Unlike Steve, who has a ball cap pulled low over his face, Bucky’s not making any particular effort at a disguise. He’s not wearing anything to obscure his face, and even his prosthetic is bare and ungloved. His hair, still long and looking temptingly soft right now, is pulled back in a low, artfully messy bun of the sort Steve has seen men wear in this century’s Brooklyn, and Bucky’s dressed not unlike them too, in tight black jeans and a close-fitting henley shirt under his black peacoat, a soft-looking gray scarf stuffed into one of the pockets. He doesn’t look at all as if he’s stepped out of the black and white film still playing in a loop on the screen across from them; he looks like someone young and new, someone who belongs in exactly this moment. He looks beautiful.

His eyes though, those do look the same, only all the better for being in living, clear skies color, and they’re creasing up in a bright mirror of his recorded self’s affection.

“Seriously, what’s this about, Steve? You come here often to, what, reminisce about the good ol’ days?” Bucky frowns, making his nose wrinkle up in adorable disapproval. “Don’t tell me you’re here to brood.”

Is this real, Steve wonders. The warmth of Bucky’s body beside his certainly feels real, and when Steve reaches for Bucky’s hand to grip it tightly, it’s cold with the bite of autumn’s chill, undeniably flesh and blood in Steve’s grasp. Steve automatically brings up his other hand to chafe some warmth into it, and Bucky’s frown disappears, replaced by a smile that starts in the lines around his eyes and ends in the pearly flash of his teeth. Bucky squeezes Steve’s hand and scoots closer to him on the bench.

“I come here when I miss seeing your dumb mug, obviously,” Steve tells him. “Am I gonna have to keep making trips here, or—or am I gonna get to see the real thing in living color more often?”

Bucky turns his attention back to the looping video, then tips his head in the direction of the uniformed mannequins a few yards away. “Good thing I didn’t wear a blue coat, huh? Didn’t realize I was in quite so much of this exhibit.”

“ _Bucky_. Are you—are you here to stay? Are you okay?”

“Am I okay,” repeats Bucky thoughtfully. “I dunno. I’m okay enough, I guess. Don’t think I’ll ever be totally okay. I’m still the Winter Soldier, Steve. I always will be. I’m—I’m ready to stay anyway, though. If you’ll have me.”

Bucky’s looking down at their joined hands now, an uncharacteristic shyness in the way his down-swept, thick eyelashes hide his expression.

“Are you kidding me? Of course I’ll have you, Winter Soldier and all. I—you gotta know I—always. I want you, always.”

Now Bucky looks up at him, with the same kind of intense, searching focus he’d had as the Winter Soldier.

“Me too,” he says, solemn and quiet. “I don’t think I really knew that, before. Turns out amnesia’s good for one thing, at least: perspective.”

They’re sitting even closer now, thighs pressed up against each other, shoulders brushing, heads tipped together, close and private.

“Yeah, I didn’t—I didn’t really know before either. I mean, I knew, but—I was an idiot. A debriefing from my future self via magic space rock really helped clarify that.”

“A _what_?”

Steve frowns. “Wait, Tony didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?” asks Bucky slowly.

“How I even found you in the first place, how I knew about HYDRA,” Steve says. “Didn’t you wonder?”

“I—I thought it was from the files Stark hacked into, or the data dump!”

“Oh, no, I got a visit from my future self from an alternate timeline. He fought me for the Mind Stone—you know, the magic space rock—and he told me you were alive before he disappeared with the Stone. Then he came back, and did something with the Stone to leave me a bunch of his memories so we could avert the genocide of the half of the entire universe, and then he left again to go back to the year 2024.”

Bucky’s mouth falls open, and he gapes at Steve in silence.

“Seriously, I thought you and Tony were in touch? Didn’t he tell you anything?”

“About half of what that guy says is impenetrable modern pop culture references, I thought—I thought he was, I dunno, making a reference! Exaggerating! Steve, what the fuck!”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” soothes Steve, and gives into the urge to touch Bucky’s hair. A few stray strands have fluttered free of his bun, and Steve tucks them carefully back behind Bucky’s ear. “We definitely averted the whole genocide thing, it’s all fine.”

Bucky closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, which yeah, okay, that’s a reasonable response here.

“Okay, I’m gonna need you to explain all of that a _hell_ of a lot more, later.”

“Sure thing, Buck,” says Steve agreeably as Bucky leans in even closer. “If that’s the plan for later, what’s the plan for now?”

Bucky’s only answer is a kiss. It’s a declaration of a kiss, firm and hot and demanding, until Bucky cups Steve’s face gently with his metal hand, and turns it into something else entirely: a sweet beginning, maybe, or a promise, all with the soft and wanting touch of his lips and tongue, the way he shares breath with Steve, the very faint throaty hum of pure need that escapes him. Everything in Steve goes warm and slow, calm with absolute certainty.

“On second thought, maybe that’s the plan for later too,” murmurs Bucky when he pulls away.

“It should be the plan for always,” says Steve. He’d meant it to come out joking and playful, but instead the words are fervent and serious.

“Okay,” says Bucky quietly, his eyes shining. “Always sounds good to me.”

And forget about the few seconds of grayscale joy preserved in the footage still running across from them: the broad and bright smile that’s on Bucky’s face right now outshines it like the sun versus the moon. Steve doesn’t have to make do with the pale reflected memory of the light Bucky’s always brought to his life. He’s got the real, sun-warm glow back now, right here in his reach, and he doesn’t ever intend to let it go.


End file.
